i 

II 



MR8888BB19 




Glass 
Book 



Copyright N°. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



OUTLINES OF SOCIAL THEOLOGY 



-* 



jtxm 



OUTLINES 



OF 



SOCIAL THEOLOGY 



BY 



WILLIAM DeWITT HYDE, D.D. 

PRESIDENT OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE 




MACMILLAN AND CO. 

AND LONDON 

1895 
All rights reserved 



Buns 



Copyright, 1895, 
By MACMILLAN AND CO. 



¥3 



Narfoooti -press : 

J. S. Gushing- & Co. — Berwick & Smith. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



PREFACE 

Idealism and theology, originally joined to- 
gether in "the Gospel according to St. John," 
were put asunder through the estrangement of 
the Greek and Latin churches. The Greek church 
put a metaphysic in the place of religion, and paid 
the penalty in spiritual sterility. The Latin church 
put authority in the place of reason, and paid the 
penalty in intellectual barrenness. Protestantism 
has inherited the Greek formulas without the phi- 
losophy which gave them meaning, and the Latin 
distrust of reason without the authority which 
made dogmatism effective. The remedy lies in a 
reunion of vital religion with rational theology. 

The time has not come for writing this new the- 
ology. The returns from psychology and soci- 
ology, on which it will depend, are not yet in. 
A man however may blaze a path, even though 
he lacks the materials and the capacity to build a 
road. This little book aims to point out the log- 
ical relations in which the doctrines of theology 
will stand to each other when the time shall come 



vi PREFACE 

again for seeing Christian truth in the light of reason 
and Christian life as the embodiment of love. 

I have called it Social Theology, because the 
Christianity of Christ and his disciples was pre- 
eminently a social movement, and because we 
are looking at everything to-day from the social 
rather than the individualistic point of view. In 
ethics, in economics, in sociology, in politics, we 
no longer treat man as capable of isolation. Units 
homo, nullus homo. Man is what he is by virtue 
of his relations to that which he is not. In these 
special sciences we try to solve the problem of 
the individual by putting him into right relations 
with the forces and persons about him. Christ 
came to place man in right relations with God, 
with nature, and with his fellow-men. The modern 
man translates the Greek tyvxv Dv n ^ e rather than 
soul. The preservation and enrichment of life, not 
the mere insuring and saving of the soul, is the 
function of religion which appeals to men to-day. 
And at this period of transition the adjective 
"social" serves to call attention to the shifting of 
emphasis from the abstract and formal relation of 
the isolated individual to an external Ruler, over 
to man's concrete and essential relations to the 
Divine Life manifested in nature, history, and 
human society. 



PREFACE vii 

A few paragraphs of this book, amounting to 
twenty or thirty pages, have appeared in pub- 
lished sermons and addresses, and in articles in 
the Andover Review, the Outlook, the Century, 
and the Forum. The greater part, the relation 
of parts to each other, and the interpretation of 
each part in the light of the whole, is entirely 
new. 

For valuable suggestions and criticisms upon 
the proofs, my thanks are due to Professor Egbert 

C. Smyth, of Andover Seminary ; Professor George 
H. Palmer, of Harvard University ; and Professor 

D. Collin Wells, of Dartmouth College. 

With the exception of the first and last chap- 
ters I have avoided the technical philosophical 
discussion which theology always invites. In 
dealing with the grounds of belief in God, in 
the first chapter, I have found it impossible to 
treat the subject at all without assuming some 
familiarity with the results of metaphysical in- 
quiry. And yet the presentation there made is 
the merest summary of the idealistic position. In 
the last chapter also I have introduced a summary 
of the idealistic objections to asceticism, hedonism, 
socialism, and promiscuous charity. The general 
reader is advised to skip both these chapters. 
Yet it was impossible to omit them from the book 



viii PREFACE 

without leaving" it logically very incomplete. For 
after all metaphysics must be the Alpha, and 
ethics the Omega, of any theology which is 
rooted in reason and fruitful in life. 

WILLIAM DeWITT HYDE. 

Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Me., 
January 21, 1895. 



CONTENTS. 

Part I. Theological. 

PAGE 

i. The World and the Self — The Father .... 3 

2. The Real and the Ideal — The Son 39 

3. The Natural and the Spiritual — The Holy 

Spirit 71 

Part II. Anthropological. 

4. Sin and Law — Judgment 89 

5. Repentance and Faith — Salvation 112 

6. Regeneration and Growth — Life 149 

Part III. Sociological. 

7. Possession and Confession — The Church .... 175 

8. Enjoyment and Service — The Redemption of the 

World 215 

9. Abstraction and Aggregation — The Organization 

of the Kingdom 233 



IX 



Part I 



THEOLOGICAL 



SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

CHAPTER I 

THE WORLD AND THE SELF THE FATHER 

There are three stages in the spiritual develop- 
ment of man. The first stage is world-conscious- 
ness ; in which he is engrossed by the stream of 
sensations which come pouring in from the great 
world without. The second stage is self-conscious- 
ness; in which he goes forth with eager ambition 
to subject this outward world of men and things 
to the forms of his understanding and the service 
of his will. The third stage is God-consciousness ; 
in which, unsatisfied with self and the world, he 
devotes the matured powers of reflection and self- 
determination to the unselfish service of objective 
and universal ends. The first stage is the state 
of nature. The second is the plane of science, 
art, business, politics, and culture. The third is 
the sphere of religion. 

These stages are not mutually exclusive. They 

3 



4 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

are rather distinguishable aspects, different de- 
grees of maturity, of the one indivisible life of 
man. The higher include the lower. The later 
take up into themselves the significance of all 
that has gone before. Science and art fare ill if 
they ignore the solid ground of sensuous fact. 
Religion degenerates into an empty form, a use- 
less and mischievous superstition, if it fails to 
make close connection with the science and art 
and business and culture of the age. 

The first of these stages need not detain us 
long. Psychology tells us there is no pure sen- 
sation in adult life. Sensations are mere signs 
which we at once work up into perceptions. Sen- 
sations are only the raw material of the world our 
thought constructs. The world pure and simple, 
apart from the unity and coherence which it re- 
ceives from the mind which thinks it, is no world 
at all. It is a chaos, not a cosmos. It is, as Pro- 
fessor James says of the object of the baby's 
consciousness, u one big, blooming, buzzing Con- 
fusion." 

The notion that there is a world unrelated to our 
intelligence, which yet makes impressions on the 
blank white paper of a passive intellect and drops 
ready-made ideas into the previously empty cabi- 
net of a merely receptive mind, is a relic of phil- 



THEOLOGICAL 5 

osophical superstition which Kant's Critique of 
Pure Reason has demolished ; and the last vesti- 
ges of which modern psychology has swept away. 
The world we know and talk about, the only world 
we can conceive and think, is a world which the 
mind creates for itself out of the materials which 
sensation brings. One might as well say that the 
cloth which comes out of a factory is the exclu- 
sive product of the bales of cotton that are 
dumped into the picker-room, as to claim that 
the world as we know it is the exclusive pro- 
duct of sensation. What the card and the jenny 
and the loom do to the raw cotton, that the 
forms and categories of the understanding do to 
the raw material of sensation. As the cloth is 
the joint product of the material and the machin- 
ery, so knowledge is the joint product of sensation 
and' the mind which reacts on it and works it over. 
The world of mere sensation, therefore, is not the 
ultimate reality. 

No less disastrous than the effort of the mind 
to treat the world as ultimate reality is the 
practical attempt to make it the object of our 
devotion. At some time or other, we all try 
the experiment. We go out into the world ex- 
pecting to find there, ready-made and fitted to 
our forms, the happiness we crave. But, like the 



6 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

prodigal, we soon discover that perpetual feasting 
ends in feeding swine. The world was not made 
to order to gratify our wants Of itself, it will not 
even supply our physical necessities. Nor do our 
fellowmen stand waiting to receive and execute 
our orders. " And he began to be in want ; and 
no man gave unto him," is the pitiful plight in 
which Nature leaves those who cast themselves 
blindly upon her bounty. We cannot be satisfied 
with the husks, which give such perfect satisfac- 
tion to the swine. The reason is that we are more 
than they. It was " when he came to himself," 
that the prodigal determined to return from the 
far country. As Carlyle has explained it, " Man's 
unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his great- 
ness ; it is because there is an infinite in him, 
which, with all his cunning, he cannot quite bury 
under the finite. Will the whole finance ministers 
and upholsterers and confectioners of modern Eu- 
rope undertake in joint-stock company to make 
one shoeblack happy ? They cannot accomplish it 
above an hour or two ; for the shoeblack also has 
a soul quite other than his stomach ; and would 
require, if you consider it, for his permanent satis- 
faction and saturation, simply this allotment, no 
more, no less ; God's infinite universe altogether to 
himself, therein to enjoy infinitely, and fill every 



THEOLOGICAL J 

wish as fast as it rose. Always there is a black 
spot in our sunshine ; it is even, as I said, the 
shadow of ourselves." Carlyle's shoeblack and 
Jesus's prodigal are brought up at the same point ; 
the unsatisfied, infinite self. 

This incapacity of the finite and fleeting world 
without to satisfy the spirit within, is the half- 
truth of pessimism and the secret of its charm. 

"We demand 
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour 
Their stupefying power ; 
Ah, yes ; and they benumb us at our call ! 
Yet still from time to time, vague and forlorn. 
From the soul's subterranean depth upborne 
As from an infinitely distant land, 
Come airs and floating echoes, and convey 
A melancholy into all our day. 11 

The quest of pleasure in outward things defeats 
itself. Cyrenaicism teaches suicide. If man's 
ultimate relation is to blind and unconscious na- 
ture, then Schopenhauer is right when he exclaims : 
" Desires are limitless, claims inexhaustible, and 
every satisfied desire gives rise to a new one. No 
possible satisfaction in the world could suffice to 
still its longings, set a goal to its infinite cravings, 
and fill the bottomless abyss of the heart. Happi- 
ness always lies in the future, or else in the past, 



8 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

and the present may be compared to a small dark 
cloud which the wind drives over the sunny plain ; 
before and behind it all is bright, only it itself 
always casts a shadow. The present is therefore 
always insufficient ; but the future is uncertain, and 
the past irrevocable. Nothing at all is worth our 
striving, our efforts and struggles, all good things 
are vanity, the world is bankrupt at all ends, and 
life is a business which does not pay expenses." 

Neither intellectually nor practically can we rest 
in mere world-consciousness, and accept the world 
as the ultimate reality. We must turn next to 
ourselves. Intra te quaere deurn. 

The world within the mind of man, the world as 
thought makes it, the world of human science and 
art and history and politics, is throughout an ordered 
world. All things are firmly bound together by 
indissoluble laws ; so that a change at one point 
involves a compensating change in everything 
even remotely connected with it. Every act that 
takes place here implies corresponding reaction 
everywhere. What I do now is at once the 
product of all my past, and a determining ele- 
ment, however slight, in all my future. This 
oak tree now before me, owes its size and shape 
to thousands of oaks and acorns that have gone 
before ; to the soil that feeds its roots ; to the 



THEOLOGICAL 9 

upheaval, denudation, vegetation, and decay, which 
formed that soil ; to sunshine and storm ; to 
measureless cycles of clashing meteors and dif- 
fused fire mist and glowing earth and cooling 
crust out of which sunshine and storm were born. 
This man upon the street derives his present 
being from countless generations of men and 
women who bridged for him the gulf between 
the savage and the civilized estate ; to number- 
less animal forms which in the struggle for exist- 
ence won the right of his superior structure to 
survive ; to liberties secured on ancient battle- 
fields and institutions inherited from unremem- 
bered days ; to parents, friends, teachers, books, 
influences, ideals, inextricably blended in the 
seamless robe which we all wear and call envi- 
ronment. 

This world of our thought is one. All things 
in it stand to each other in reciprocal rela- 
tions. Each thing must take its definite place 
by the side of other things in space; each event 
must take its precise position before and after 
other events in time ; each quality must be bound 
up with and dependent upon other qualities under 
the conception of substance which we put upon 
groups of qualities in order to hold them together 
in our minds ; each change must be the correlate 



IO SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

of other changes according to the law of cause 
and effect, whereby we maintain for our thought 
the identity of the world in the midst of its un- 
ceasing transformation. 

Thus the world of our own thought, which in 
fact is the only world we know and can talk 
about, proves to be a world built up by the 
activity of our own minds, which reduce the 
uncoordinated data of sensation to unity and or- 
der by imposing upon them forms of perception 
and laws of relation which are inherent, not as 
formulated propositions, but as modes of opera- 
tion, in the rational nature of the mind itself. 
That the world of our thought is one ; that it 
is an ordered world ; that it is a coherent system 
of rational and reciprocal relations ; and that this 
unity and rationality of the world we think is 
due, not to the raw material of sensation dumped 
into a passive and receptive mind, but to the 
reaction of an active intelligence which con- 
tributes out of its own nature the forms and 
categories by which it reduces the manifold of 
sensation to the unity of reason, — this, in brief- 
est possible form, is the positive outcome of the 
Critique of Kant. 

The order and rationality we find in nature, 
then, is not material, but mental : it is not im- 



THEOLOGICAL I I 

printed on our senses from without, but is imposed 
upon sensation from within. And, we must rec- 
ognize, even at this preliminary stage in the dis- 
cussion, that, as Herbert Spencer has said, "This 
necessity we are under to think of the external 
energy in terms of the internal energy, gives 
rather a spiritualistic than a materialistic aspect 
to the Universe." The world is the great mirror 
in which our reason sees itself reflected. Of so 
much Kant makes us sure. Is that all? Can 
we stop here? Is the intelligence by which 
we interpret the world simply our intelligence ? 
Can we rest satisfied in a merely subjective 
idealism ? 

The raw material, the sensations themselves, 
we certainly did not create. Kant had to admit 
an external source from which these sensations 
come. He, however, placed this source of sen- 
sation in "things in themselves," out of all pos- 
sible relation to the mind of man, which can 
merely receive sensations, but is unable to go 
behind the immediate returns sensations give. 
Kant thus prepared the way for the agnosticism 
of Herbert Spencer. And when Mr. Spencer 
tells us that " amid the mysteries which become 
the more mysterious the more they are thought 
about, there will remain the one absolute certainty, 



12 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

that man is ever in presence of an Infinite and 
Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed " ; 
and then adds that, " The power manifested 
throughout the Universe distinguished as mate- 
rial, is the same power which in ourselves wells 
up under the form of consciousness " ; and then, 
having gone so far, stops short with the decla- 
ration that we can know absolutely nothing of 
this Power of whose existence we are sure, he is 
simply translating Kant's inaccessible source of 
phenomena into his own Unknowable Background 
of the universe. 

Kant and Spencer leave us with a world which 
is essentially mental ; a world which our own 
minds alone cannot explain ; and the certainty that 
there is something beyond which does explain this 
world with its " spiritualistic rather than material- 
istic aspect." 

If the source of phenomena merely gave us sen- 
sations and nothing more ; if one mind could inter- 
pret these sensations in oneway, and another could 
interpret them in another ; if there were no reason 
in the world except that which the individual minds 
of men impose upon it ; if there were no such thing 
as verification of the opinion of man by the objec- 
tive witness of nature ; if there were no objective 
standard to which all finite minds are compelled to 



THEOLOGICAL 1 3 

conform ; if there were no valid and immutable 
distinction between truth and falsehood, between 
science and fancy, between proved theory and 
probable hypothesis, — then indeed the position in 
which Kant and Spencer leave us would be final 
and ultimate. 

These very things, however, it is the peculiar 
achievement of modern science to have established. 
We can verify our subjective notions by appealing 
to the test of objective experiment. We make 
predictions ; and nature fulfils our expectations to 
the minute. We recognize an established body of 
scientific truth which we have discovered, not cre- 
ated ; and which no man may deny without thereby 
banishing himself from the society of the intelli- 
gent. We accept a standard of objective truth ; we 
acknowledge that there is one system of thought- 
relations, common to all thinking minds ; and we 
judge a given proposition to be true or false accord- 
ing as it falls within or falls without this one sys- 
tem of rational relations. 

In the crises of development, when new truths 
are declared and new standards of duty are pro- 
claimed, this divine background of truth comes 
to the front. When Copernicus declares in oppo- 
sition to the unanimous opinion of mankind that 
the earth moves around the sun, what gives him 



14 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

confidence in the truth of his assertion ? If it 
is merely his opinion, it cannot maintain itself 
against the opinion of mankind. If the opinions 
of finite minds are the ultimate source of truth, 
then neither the opinion of Copernicus nor that 
of his opponents is certainly true. Both are 
merely probable. And of the two theirs is more 
probable than his. The ground of the astrono- 
mer's confidence is that there is a rational rela- 
tion of things, as infinite reason, in which the 
revolution of the earth around the sun always 
was, is now, and always will be, an inseparable 
and undeniable element. Into that thought 
Copernicus has entered. He is prepared to show 
that with his doctrine of the revolution of the 
earth, all other astronomical facts fall into har- 
mony ; without this doctrine, all other facts 
remain in confusion and contradiction. As Coper- 
nicus said : " By a close and long observation 
I have at length found that, if the motions of 
the rest of the planets be compared w T ith the 
circulation of the earth, and be computed for the 
revolution of each, not only their phenomena will 
follow, but it will so connect the orders and mag- 
nitudes of the planets and all the orbs, and even 
heaven itself, that nothing in any part of it 
could be transposed without the confusion of 



THEOLOGICAL 1 5 

the rest of the parts, and of the whole uni- 
verse." This thought, which is common to him 
and to his opponents ; this thought, which is 
common both to the minds of all thinking men 
and to the forms of the external order ; this 
rational and universal relation of things, which 
is the basis of the ultimate agreement of all can- 
did minds with each other, and the guarantee 
that their united judgment is in agreement with 
the facts, — this is the only rational ground of 
the confidence which the scientific discoverer 
has in the new truth which he declares. If 
there were two natural orders, he might be 
talking of one, and his opponents of the other. 
If there were no objective rational order, both 
he and they might be amusing themselves with 
fancies equally true because equally subjective; 
but equally false because nothing could be found 
to which either could be proved to correspond. 

The facts which we have been considering 
demand some explanation. The fixed relations in 
which all objects of our thought stand to each 
other are not of our own making. ' This coherence 
of all the forces in the world, in such a way 
that we cannot think of a change in one element 
or member without thinking corresponding and 
compensating changes in the whole, is no device 



1 6 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

of the subjective mind of the individual beholder. 
This unity of all the forces and facts of the 
world in an organic whole of reason we dis- 
cover, but do not create. The universality of 
law, the verification of hypothesis, the fulfilment 
of prediction, the established body of science, 
the objective validity of truth and its distinc- 
tion from error, the necessity of all finite minds 
to think alike on all subjects which, like mathe- 
matics and demonstrated science, admit of perfect 
clearness and distinctness, — these facts require 
for their explanation a common ground of unity 
between nature and the mind of man ; a bond 
and basis of intelligibility between different minds ; 
a supreme source and standard of truth authori- 
tative over all finite minds. Such a ground of 
unity, and bond of intelligibility, and source and 
standard of truth can be found in nothing short 
of the Absolute Thought, the Infinite Spirit, or 
God. 

As the uniform order of physical events, and 
science which is its mental equivalent and corre- 
late, reveals the Absolute Mind ; so the developing 
order of human society, and morality which is its 
subjective counterpart, reveals the Universal Will. 

When Socrates preaches moral doctrine con- 
trary to the conventional Athenian tradition, why. 



THEOLOGICAL 17 

should he die rather than renounce his voca- 
tion ? If it is a mere question of individual 
preference, all Athens is more likely to be right 
than a single individual. Socrates affirms that 
it is not his private opinion which he is setting 
forth, but an absolute and eternal right of which 
he is the mouthpiece. How does he know this ? 
Because with his doctrine he can see the facts 
of the moral life, as one harmonious whole. 
Without it he sees that these facts contradict 
each other ; and he is prepared to manifest 
these contradictions to any one who will con- 
sent to answer his questions on these points. 
It was because of his confidence in a right not 
of his own making or choosing, that he refused 
to abandon his teaching. Hence his boldness. 
" If you say to me, Socrates, this time we will 
let you off, but upon one condition, that you 
are not to inquire and speculate in this way any 
more, and that if you are caught doing this 
again you shall die, — if this was the condi- 
tion on which you let me go, I should reply : 
'Men of Athens, I honour and love you; but 
I shall obey God rather than you, and while I 
have life and breath I shall never cease from 
the practice and teaching of philosophy.' For 
I do believe that there are gods, and in a far 
c 



!g SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

higher sense than that in which any of my ac- 
cusers believe in them." 

At first sight the customs and institutions of 
different ages, races, and nations seem as conflicting 
and chaotic as the forces of nature seem to the 
unscientific mind. Yet while the specific customs 
and institutions of society are undergoing perpetual 
change, the great purpose at which these seem- 
ingly inconsistent and actually conflicting prin- 
ciples and practices are aiming is constant and 
unvarying. That purpose is such an adjustment 
of the several members of society to each other 
that out of their united action there may result a 
harmonious social order in which each individual 
shall be at once the servant and the lord of all. In 
the beginnings of society this purpose is indeed 
hidden underneath intolerable burdens of usurpa- 
tion and tyranny ; and the course of social evolu- 
tion is marked by oppression, corruption, and the 
betrayal of the common interest by those whom 
inheritance, or power, or wealth, or popular elec- 
tion have constituted its guardians and defenders. 
And yet the fact that we recognize these things as 
wrong, and the fact that by revolution and rebel- 
lion, by agitation and reform, society has succeeded 
in correcting these abuses and dethroning these 
usurpers, shows that underneath all the injustices 



THEOLOGICAL 1 9 

and wrongs it has endured there has been ever 
present, as the silent judge and the omnipotent 
avenger, the social ideal of a society in which each 
individual is at once end and means to every 
other. 

And if we turn from the outward social ideal to 
the inner moral standard, or conscience, we find 
even clearer evidence of the presence of a Will 
higher than our own. Morality is something far 
deeper than the prudential regulation of personal 
conduct for private advantage, although such 
prudence is an important and essential element 
of morality. In the deeper moral experience we 
come face to face with a "categorical impera- 
tive." We recognize that the doing of duty is 
what makes us men. We feel that to be false 
to duty is to violate our inmost nature, and to be 
unworthy of a place in the world in which we live. 
This sense of responsibility for conduct is the 
fundamental instinct of the race. 

Now the contents of this moral ideal are drawn 
from and correspond to the requirements of the 
social order of which we form a part. To be a 
good member of society, and to have a clear con- 
science, are the outer and inner aspects of one 
and the selfsame thing. You can distinguish 
these two aspects in thought, but you can no more 



20 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

separate them in fact than you can separate the 
convexity of the outside from the concavity of the 
inside of a circle. And yet, while drawn from and 
dependent upon the outer social order, the moral 
ideal is always transcending this order. The good 
individual owes all his goodness to the society in 
which he has been reared ; and yet he feels called 
upon to give back to that social order services 
and standards which tend to make it better. In 
a word, while the ideal of human life is embodied 
and preserved in society, it is developed in the 
consciences and advanced by the efforts of indi- 
viduals. 

This constant correlation of the outer order 
of society and the inner ideal of conduct requires 
some common ground as its explanation. As the 
correlation of physical facts with human science 
involves an Absolute Mind expressed in nature 
and progressively unfolding himself to the advanc- 
ing science of man ; so this correlation of the 
social order and the moral ideal involves a Univer- 
sal Will embodied in the progressive evolution of 
the social order, and revealed in the ever-expanding 
ideal of the moral life. And as the impulse toward 
scientific discovery rests on the belief that the 
science which we know is only a fragment of the 
infinite science as it exists in the Absolute Mind ; 



THEOLOGICAL 2 1 

so the impulse to moral reform springs from an 
implicit faith that the social institutions and moral 
standards prevalent at a given time are but arcs of 
the infinite circle, stages in the eternal process by 
which the Universal Will is realizing his purpose 
in society, and reproducing his likeness in the 
hearts of men. 

Again, just as the possibility of error is proof 
positive of the reality of truth, and of an absolute 
basis of truth in the Infinite Mind ; so the con- 
sciousness of wrong is the infallible witness of the 
reality of right, and of its eternal ground in the 
Universal Will that makes for righteousness. If 
I were the only being in the universe, then my pri- 
vate caprice and fancy would be supreme. To be 
sure, one impulse of mine even then might come 
into conflict with another, and I should discover 
that this isolated self is more than the sum of 
its particular states. But whatever should give 
me permanent satisfaction would therefore justify 
itself as right ; because by hypothesis there would 
be no other interests with which it could conflict. 
Why is it then that I am dissatisfied, ashamed, 
conscious of guilt, when I have done something 
which seems to perfectly promote my interests as 
an individual ? Because I am more than an indi- 
vidual, and am conscious of the claims of other 



22 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

beings upon me. But how comes it to pass that 
these other beings, and society which is the organ- 
ization of the interests of these other beings, have 
a claim upon me ? To be sure, they, and society as 
their agent, may punish me if I offend them. But 
this guilt and shame and sense of ill-desert, though 
historically originating in experience of actual 
punishment, has come to be a far deeper senti- 
ment than mere fear of external penalty accounts 
for ; and there are many wrongs I can commit 
against society of which neither the law nor public 
sentiment will ever take the slightest notice. And 
yet I feel condemned. I feel that these other 
beings and their interests belong to me and are 
part of my own proper interest. This conscious- 
ness of wrong, this sense of guilt, is the persistent 
witness to the fact that in our inmost being we 
are one with those whose rights we have disre- 
garded, and a member of that social order whose 
laws we have disobeyed. The consciousness of a 
limit is the knowledge of that which transcends 
the limit. The confession of guilt is the acknowl- 
edgment of obligation. The insufficiency of the 
private self is the revelation of the identification 
of self with society. 

Here, through the attempt to break the bond 
which binds us to our fellows, we discover how 



THEOLOGICAL 23 

strong it is, and how impossible it is for us to cast 
it off. This bond which binds all men together, 
making authoritative for each the rights of all, can 
be nothing less than the Universal Will which 
holds all beings as the objects of an impartial in- 
terest and an equal devotion. The progressive 
and purposeful order of society ; the correlation of 
the social order and the moral ideal ; and the im- 
possibility of escaping even by wrongdoing from 
the bond that binds the individual to society con- 
stitute the evidence from the social order and the 
moral ideal of the existence of the Universal Will. 

These lines of thought preserve what is valua- 
ble in the substance, while they avoid what is inade- 
quate in the form of the traditional proofs of the 
existence of God. As demonstrations of the exist- 
ence of a Being anterior to creation and external 
to the world, these proofs are fallacious in method 
and illusory in result. As expositions of imma- 
nent causality and immanent teleology and imma- 
nent rationality in nature and in man, they all 
contain elements of truth. 

The cosmological argument for a first cause is 
unsatisfactory ; for it rests on an unwarranted pro- 
jection of an analogy which, just because it is 
true of interdependent finite phenomena, is by no 
means sure to hold true of the relation of phe- 



24 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

nomena as a whole to an external source. And 
even if we could prove such an external first 
cause, it would be of little use to us ; for such an 
extraneous source of phenomena either is mani- 
fested in the effect, in which case he is more 
than the mere cause ; or else he is not mani- 
fested in the effect ; in which case he at once 
vanishes into the thin air of Mr. Spencer's Un- 
knowable ; or at best remains " the Great First 
Cause, least understood." 

The argument from design is nearer the truth ; 
but at best can give but half the truth. The de- 
signer is limited by the materials he works with ; 
and we can never be sure that the plan which we 
discover is precisely the plan he had in mind. 
That there is an "immanent purposiveness " in the 
world, all our aesthetic and moral experience in- 
deed attests. But that an external will impressed 
this or that stamp upon it at this or that moment 
in time, we cannot assume. The moral argument, 
in so far as it bases belief in God on the hope of 
righteous retribution, whereby the evils of this 
world shall be righted in the next, is an inference 
from the absence of justice here to its existence 
elsewhere ; and carries no conviction. Still less, 
according to the general interpretation of the onto- 
logical argument, are we justified in leaping from 



THEOLOGICAL 25 

the requirements of our accidental notions to the 
necessities of things. 

The cosmological argument is right in its recog- 
nition that interdependent finite phenomena must 
have a Ground ; but it is wrong in placing that 
Ground back somewhere in time. The physico- 
teleological argument is right in its recognition of 
purpose ; but is wrong in thrusting that purpose 
outside of the world. The moral argument is 
right in affirming retribution ; but it is wrong in 
postponing that retribution to a remote future. 
The ontological argument is right in affirming 
that the Infinite and Absolute is a necessity of 
thought ; but is wrong in assuming that there is a 
world of reality other than the world of thought, 
to which the conditions of thought may or may 
not apply. These arguments are all stages of a 
single process by which man has sought to con- 
fess the dependence of all things upon an Abso- 
lute Ground ; the participation of all beings in an 
Infinite Purpose ; the obligation of all men to an 
Eternal Will ; the presupposition in all thinking 
of a Universal Reason. 

What then is the logical character of our belief 
in such a Being ? We cannot prove it by deduc- 
tion ; for there is nothing greater from which such 
a Being might be deduced. No major premise 



26 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

can be found which will warrant so vast a conclu- 
sion. Neither by induction of an indefinite num- 
ber of particulars can we arrive at an infinite being 
which includes them all. No mere aggregate of 
particulars can constitute the universal. 

Is the belief in God then merely a working 
hypothesis, as President Schurman is content to 
call it ? No. An hypothesis, as its etymology 
signifies, is something which we put wider facts, 
in order to explain them. The Absolute Mind, 
however, is not something which we put behind 
nature and the mind of man to explain their agree- 
ment. It is there of itself. It is presupposed in 
the facts. It is the source of science and the 
foundation of morals. Were there no Absolute 
Mind, there could be no science ; were there no 
Universal Will, there could be no firm basis for 
morality. Science and morality, however, are real, 
patent, indisputable facts. Therefore, that with- 
out which these facts could not be, must exist. If 
you have two mountains, you must have the valley 
between them, which by their very nature the moun- 
tains require as the condition of their own exist- 
ence. If you have two bones which fit into each 
other, you have absolute proof of the prior exist- 
ence of the whole animal body, with its other 
bones, its flesh and blood, its heart and lungs, its 



THEOLOGICAL 2J 

nerves and muscles, without which these two 
bones, related to each other as they are, could 
not have come into being. Given the fact of these 
bones, and the organic relations between them, 
and the existence of the organism is not merely 
a hypothesis. It is a certainty. If the bones are 
facts, the body of which they were members must 
have been a fact as well. 

The world and the self, and their correlation in 
science, are related members which fit into each 
other perfectly, and yet which are incomplete 
in themselves, and require One Infinite Reason 
for their explanation. The social order and the 
moral ideal again are likewise two mutually con- 
ditioned members, which presuppose for their 
rational interpretation an Absolute Will. The 
partial science of a given age is the witness and 
prophecy of an absolute standard of truth, a com- 
plete circle of knowledge, by which its propositions 
are judged to be true, of which its fragmentary 
discoveries are arcs and elements. The progres- 
sive moral order is likewise the gradual unfolding 
of a righteous purpose from which its institutions 
derive their stability and its precepts their author- 
ity. Since the truths of science are not subjective 
fancies, but are stubborn facts ; since the laws and 
institutions of morality are not the products of 



28 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

individual caprice, but eternal realities ; therefore, 
the Absolute Reason and Eternal Righteousness 
which they reveal and presuppose must also be 
real, actual, objective ; must exist. 

God is not a mere hypothesis which we put 
under the facts ; as subjective idealism claims. 
He is the hypostasis, in the literal meaning of the 
term, who stands under the facts, and gives them 
the reality they have. What the skeleton is to 
the constituent bones; what the solar system is 
to the included planets ; what the family is to 
its members ; what the nation is to the citizens ; 
all that and more God is to every truth that 
man thinks after him and every law his universe 
contains. He is in all and through all and over 
all. He is immanent in each individual mind and 
each particular atom. Yet as an organism is more 
than the sum of its parts, God is transcendent in 
the sense that all particulars are but incomplete 
and fragmentary revelations of his mind and will. 

This fundamental intuition that the mutually 
related, interdependent, finite facts of the world 
and the self involve as their necessary presup- 
position and only possible explanation the Abso- 
lute and Infinite, which cannot be cast in 
syllogistic form simply because it bears witness 
to the universal major premise on which all formal 



THEOLOGICAL 29 

reasoning rests, assures us that God exists. Does 
it tell us anything about him ? Have we any right 
to identify the Absolute of philosophy with the 
God of religion ? Does this line of thought justify 
us in calling him a person ? 

The whole cannot be less than its parts. The 
organism cannot be inferior to its constituent 
members. The infinite cannot exclude anything 
the finite contains. Now self-consciousness, per- 
sonality, is the crowning glory of man, the highest 
of finite beings. Hence the Infinite Being whom 
all finite things and finite thoughts and finite 
beings presuppose cannot be less than self-con- 
scious and personal. He includes all the thoughts 
and acts of finite persons in the unity of his larger 
thought and will ; either approving or condemning 
them. He is as personal as we are ; for in him 
we live and move and have our being. He is 
more of a person than we are ; for the progressive 
thought of man is ever taking up into its science 
more and more of that body of truth which con- 
stitutes his eternal thought ; and advancing civili- 
zation is steadily enlarging and improving the 
social structure which is the embodiment of his 
unfolding" will. 

There are limits to human personality, as there 
are limits to human stature and human strength. 



30 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

But as God's omnipresence includes the space 
occupied by our bodies, without being limited to 
the outlines of our forms ; as God's omnipotence 
includes the strength of horses and oxen, without 
being confined to those modes of manifestation ; 
so the divine personality includes all that is posi- 
tive in human personality, without being confined 
within the narrow limits of human finitude. As 
Lotze says, " Perfect personality is reconcilable 
only with the conception of an Infinite Being ; for 
finite beings only an approximation to this is 
attainable." Paulsen and Pfleiderer express the 
same thought when they say that God cannot by 
any possibility be infra-personal. If we take the 
personality of finite beings as the standard, it 
would be more correct to say that He is supra- 
personal. God is all that we know of personality ; 
and vastly more which we cannot comprehend. 
But since the unknown is to us the unmeaning, 
the most appropriate and the perfectly justifiable 
representation of his nature, is personality as we 
know it in ourselves. This is, to be sure, not the 
whole truth : but it is a genuine part of the truth ; 
the most valuable aspect of the truth ; and the 
one which best serves our practical spiritual needs. 
The thought of God as Infinite Spirit is thus 
warranted by philosophy and justified by religion. 



THEOLOGICAL 3 1 

Such a conception leaves indeed much that is 
unknown in the nature and the ways of God. 
That any reverent view must do. It, however, 
expressly excludes agnosticism. Any view of 
God which puts him before the universe in time, 
or behind it as a cause or force, or outside of it 
as mere creator and governor, leads ultimately to 
agnosticism. For knowledge draws its materials 
from the actual, the present, the immanent. And 
God must be found and known here or nowhere. 
The idea of God as Infinite Spirit ; as Absolute 
Ground of all finite phenomena ; as the Indwelling 
Self within all finite selves, is preeminently the 
idea of a known and infinitely knowable God. All 
our knowledge of nature is so far forth knowledge 
of God. All natural and moral laws are expressions 
of the Divine Thought and Will. All our con- 
sciousness of ourselves ; all the expression of their 
deeper selves that men have wrought in history 
and uttered in literature are revelations of God. 
The source and standard of all accepted science 
and established institutions, the promise of ever- 
increasing discovery and the ideal and goal of 
ever-progressing morality, is God. He is partially 
known, progressively revealing himself, absolutely 
knowable. Not toward him as some "far-off divine 
event," but in him as the present and pervasive 



32 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

life, including "all objects of all thought," the 
whole creation lives and moves. As we know 
just as much about a curve as we know about its 
constituent arcs ; as we can construct, symboli- 
cally at least, the total curve from a very few 
given points ; so we know as much about God as 
we know about ourselves and the world. From 
the facts and implications which the world and the 
self contain we can construct a representative con- 
ception, true as far as it goes, of the Absolute 
Being in whom self and the world are related ele- 
ments, and of whom they are so far forth the 
authentic revelation and expression. The most 
important and significant of the data from which 
this representative conception must be constructed 
is the self-conscious personality of man. And any 
representation of God which excludes this element 
is not merely inadequate, as all symbolical repre- 
sentations must be, but it is needlessly inadequate, 
inasmuch as it deliberately omits from the formula 
of the infinite curve the most important datum 
given in the finite arc. The fact that we are per- 
sons ; that we are incomplete and finite persons ; 
that we know and recognize our incompleteness ; 
that we are ever enlarging the sphere of our 
thought and will ; that such enlargement is possi- 
ble only in case there is an infinite sphere of 



THEOLOGICAL 33 

thought and will into which our own thought and 
will enters and which it progressively appropriates 
in the advancing science and civilization of the 
world ; — this fact is all the evidence we need, the 
only evidence which the nature of the problem 
makes possible, of the personality of the Absolute. 
That in which our personality lives and moves and 
has its being ; that which is the presupposition of 
personality in us, cannot be less than personal. 
That by which we think cannot be unthinking and 
unthought. 

The conclusion which we have thus reached by 
reflection upon the dependent, relative, and finite 
character of phenomena, and especially of our own 
intellectual and moral experience, has been reached 
in the history of the race by a very long and 
gradual process. And yet at the heart of the 
whole process from first to last we find the recog- 
nition of the incompleteness of the finite, the 
dependence of the relative, and the endeavour to 
transcend that finitude and lay hold of the ground 
of that dependence. 

First this ground of dependence is represented 
to the mind by the promiscuous personification of 
all sorts of natural objects. With deepening re- 
flection, the spirit is separated from the object, 
and thus arises fetichism, or the attempt to control 

D 



34 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

the spirits which are supposed to dwell in natural 
objects. From this the transition to the worship 
of the spirits of departed ancestors is a natural 
advance. Increasing knowledge of the larger as- 
pects and mightier forces of nature led to the 
worship of great nature-spirits, mythological divin- 
ities, in which were united the power of nature and 
the caprice of man. With the progress of civiliza- 
tion, man comes to be less and less dependent on 
the crude forces of external nature, and more and 
more dependent on moral, industrial, social, and 
political customs and institutions. And accord- 
ingly at this stage of development he reveres 
Gods of war, of wisdom, of craft, of love, pro- 
tectors of homes, guardians of cities, rulers of 
nations. Next, if we may neglect the side cur- 
rents of Oriental quietism, comes the recognition 
of a single World-Ruler who rules in righteous- 
ness all the nations of the earth ; who is the 
upholder and vindicator of the one moral order 
which is common to all mankind. This conscious- 
ness of the One God was dimly apprehended by 
a few of the philosophers of Greece ; but in 
clearest outline and most popular and effective 
form it was revealed to the Jews. Here was elab- 
orated a ceremonial, which, if it shared the bloody 
and barbarous features of surrounding nations, still 



THEOLOGICAL 35 

was free from the two greatest defects of the con- 
temporary religious cults, idolatry and licentious- 
ness. Here was gradually developed the most 
just, humane, and merciful moral code the world 
had thus far known ; and here to a degree far 
surpassing any other nation the duties of moral- 
ity were identified with the service of God and 
enforced by the sanctions of religion. Here too 
were first heard the clear tones of prophet and 
psalmist, appealing from the letter of the law and 
the performance of the rite to the attitude of the 
heart and the spirit of the life ; and declaring that 
the true service of God is the just administration 
of national and social affairs and the merciful 
treatment of one's fellowmen. Ethical monothe- 
ism, the doctrine that we depend upon and owe 
allegiance to One God who is the author and vin- 
dicator of the moral order and the social institu- 
tions of the world ; this is the contribution of Israel 
to the religious life of man. And this doctrine is 
so true, so final, so beneficent, that, while its ritual 
is superseded, its code transcended, and all its local 
and peculiar setting outgrown ; yet by virtue of 
this eternal truth which the history of the Hebrew 
race reveals with inimitable freshness and incom- 
parable clearness, the history and literature of 
Israel is rightly regarded as the revelation of God. 



36 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

This conception of a World-Governor, however, 
is not adequate to express the intimate identifica- 
tion of God with nature and humanity. Even 
government, especially when conceived after the 
analogy of the ancient monarchies, has an element 
of externality about it, which fails to express that 
union of the organism with its members which is 
the true figure under which we conceive God's 
relation to the world of men and things. Is there 
then any relation in which the distinction of per- 
sonality is combined with the unity of sympathy 
and purpose ? Is there any sphere in which, with- 
out destroying individuality, the life of the whole 
organism is distributed through each of the mem- 
bers, and gives that unity in the midst of differ- 
ences which is the essence of social and spiritual 
life ? 

Yes ; there is one such relation. It is found in 
the family. The family is the type of a spiritual 
or social life in which one body is composed of 
many members. The head and representative of 
the family is the father. The rule of the father 
over his family is not the imposition of a law from 
without ; but is the assertion of the common in- 
terest of all as obligatory upon the will of each. 
The father is simply the head and representative 
of the total interest of the family in which each 



THEOLOGICAL 37 

member shares alike. He seeks not his individual 
will ; but rather the good of all the members. 
The authority of the father is not an arbitrary law 
or a legal abstraction. It is simply the assertion 
of the common well-being. 

Now this is precisely the relation in which the 
Absolute stands to the relative. This is the mode 
of union between the Infinite and the finite. It is 
in just this way that the Universal includes the 
particular. If then we are to express the relation 
of God to man by the symbol which is least inade- 
quate and most suggestive of the truth, we shall 
call him, not Cause, nor Substance, nor Creator, 
nor Governor, but Father ; as Jesus teaches us 
to do. 

Still even here we must be on our guard against 
the material side of this symbol, which would lead 
us to regard the Father as one individual among 
or over others. The spiritual essence of father- 
hood is the comprehensive thought, the sympa- 
thetic feeling, the devoted will, which makes the 
welfare of each member of the family the object 
of constant consideration, and unchanging affec- 
tion, and unwearied devotion. God is our Father, 
because he is the all-embracing thought which 
includes each thought and action of every human 
mind ; because he is the holy will which presents 



38 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

the ideal of conduct and the demand of duty to 
every finite will ; because he is the loving heart 
which finds no human soul alien to itself ; because 
he is the bond which binds things and thoughts 
together; because he is the unity in which society 
and individuals find their common ground and 
from which they derive their mutual obligation ; 
because he is the Spirit in whom we live and 
move and have our being ; who is never far from 
any one of us, for we are his offspring. 



CHAPTER II 

THE REAL AND THE IDEAL THE SON 

In the first chapter we saw that all the phenom- 
ena of nature and all the interests of men are pres- 
ent to an Absolute Mind who includes them in the 
unity of one thought, and makes them the objects 
of one love. To this "personal Absolute whom 
faith calls God" we gave the name "Our Father," 
because the family life, and the father as its head 
and representative, is the best example we have of 
many individual members held together in the 
unity of a single spirit. 

Belief in God most people take for granted. 
And yet the intuitive belief in God is apt to be a 
half-pictorial representation of a mighty individual, 
outside of the world, arbitrary in his decrees, re- 
mote from the daily life and foreign to the habit- 
ual thought of men. And while it is possible to 
develop an individualistic theology out of such a 
figurative conception of an external and arbitrary 
Being, it is impossible out of such a conception to 
develop a social theology, which will show the laws 

39 



40 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

of moral life and the forms of social institutions as 
essential expressions of the life of God in men. 
This belief in an Absolute Mind, even though we 
ascribe the name Father and attribute to him 
a kindly disposition, is only the foundation of the- 
ology. It answers well enough as an interpreta- 
tion of nature, but the pantheistic optimism to 
which it gives rise is a poor defence against the 
wrongs and miseries, the struggle and competition, 
of actual life. 

Life presents problems of its own, and brings 
out the deeper antithesis of the real and the ideal. 
The plant and animal have within themselves a 
principle which is different and distinct from that of 
the inanimate world. Being produced in connec- 
tion with a definite environment, they are given a 
fair start ; since unless the environment had been 
fitted to sustain them they could not have been 
produced. But nature's nursing period is brief. 
A new environment quickly follows upon the old ; 
and to this new environment the original form is 
not fitted. It must become fit or perish. The 
chance of becoming fit is offered in the fact of 
variation and enormous fecundity. In the lower 
forms of life each individual or pair leaves a mul- 
titude of offspring ; of which no two are exactly 
alike. Of this multitude those only which by 



THEOLOGICAL 4 1 

merit or fortune best fit the changed environment 
survive. And while what we may call accident 
plays a large part in determining which individ- 
uals of any given generation shall survive ; in the 
course of many generations the survivals due to 
mere outward fortune are sifted out, and only 
those which are inherently fitted to the new con- 
ditions survive and reproduce. Heredity helps on 
the process of adjustment; though in what man- 
ner and to what extent is now a matter of dispute. 
The survival of the fittest is secured by a process 
of natural selection which is automatic as gravi- 
tation or chemical affinity. 

Is natural selection a beneficent process ? It 
certainly involves much suffering, and frightful 
slaughter. And yet it is difficult to see how any 
other process could be more merciful. To permit 
forms to outlive the state of things to which they 
were originally adapted would be not kindness 
but protracted cruelty. To give the ground to 
the less fit in preference to the more fit, would 
be unjust as well as unkind. Fitness is doubtless 
purchased at a high price. But unfitness would 
cost more and be worth less. Given the fact of 
evolution, and the purpose to develop independent 
organisms, capable of becoming centres of individ- 
ual life, it is impossible to conceive how this pur- 



42 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

pose could be accomplished better. Short of 
miraculous creation to begin with, and constant 
arbitrary interference from without, there is no 
way by which the price of the perfection of species 
could be lowered. And although special creation 
and external interference are phrases which seem 
to carry meaning ; yet, when put to the test as an 
explanation of any world-process whatsoever, they 
would certainly break down under the weight of 
detail they would have to bear. 

That the less perfect shall perish and the more 
perfect shall survive, that the real shall be in constant 
subjection to the ideal, is the inexorable law of nature 
in dealing with plant and animal, and savage man, 
and primitive races of men. Though severe, it 
cannot be called unjust or cruel ; because the ends 
which evolution is accomplishing could not be had 
on easier terms. As Mr. Wallace says, "This 
struggle for existence really brings about the 
maximum of life and the enjoyment of life with 
the minimum of suffering and pain." 

As we pass from the conscious animal up to 
self-conscious man the tragic struggle deepens. 
Under civilized conditions it becomes not so much 
a struggle between individuals as between ideals. 
Yet the essential features of the process are the 
same. Good conduct at any given time is conduct 



THEOLOGICAL 43 

which adjusts man to his social environment. But 
the social like the natural environment is in a slow 
but constant process of change. 

" New occasions teach new duties : 
Time makes ancient good uncouth." 

The moment you secure a perfect adjustment, it 
becomes imperfect ; because the social order to 
which the original adjustment was made has 
changed, and what perfectly fitted the old order for 
that very reason imperfectly fits the new. Hence 
every moral and social advance has to fight its way 
not merely against the bad who oppose all order, 
but against the traditionally good, who believe that 
the social order is constant, and that what has been 
the ideal adjustment in the past must remain the 
ideal of conduct for all time. These conscientious 
but short-sighted conservatives are always more 
bitter and powerful opponents of the new ideal 
than the unprincipled rabble. The worst enemy 
of the better is the good. It was the constituted 
authorities, the conservative aristocracy of Athens, 
not the lawless and irreligious masses, who con- 
demned Socrates to drink the hemlock. It was 
the scribes and Pharisees and the chief priests 
and the principal men of Jerusalem who crucified 
Jesus. 



44 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

Out of this perpetual change, which is the very 
essence of that process of evolution through which 
the world is passing, is born the struggle between 
the imperfect reality and the perfect ideal. 

This conflict always manifests itself in a lower 
and a higher form. In the lower form it is the 
conflict between individuals who represent the 
uneliminated appetites and passions which were 
essential to an earlier stage of development, but 
which have been relatively outgrown by the pres- 
ent stage of civilization, on the one hand, and the 
law, which affirms the demand of the existing 
society, on the other. This is the simple conflict 
between good and bad as we ordinarily see it. A 
man wants to be as lustful and brutal as he was per- 
mitted and perhaps even encouraged to be in primi- 
tive savage conditions ; but the law declares that 
such conduct is inconsistent with the welfare of 
the more advanced society of which he is a mem- 
ber ; and punishes him if he violates the higher 
requirements of this more advanced social order. 
Here we see the imperfect standards of an out- 
grown past in collision with the more perfect 
standards of the actual present. The individual 
is behind society ; and society is trying to drag 
him ahead. 

The higher form of this struggle comes between 



THEOLOGICAL 45 

the law as the representative of the existing 
order ; or rather of the order which existed when 
the law was framed ; and the individuals who see 
the vision of the better order that is about to 
be, and demand institutions, customs, standards, 
duties, liberties large enough to meet the require- 
ments of the social order that has come into being 
since the law was made, or stands ready to come 
as soon as the hard crust of the old order can be 
broken so as to give the new life room. Here 
society is behind the individual, and is trying to 
hold him back. Thus the average good man is 
equally at war with the bad man who is below him 
and the progressively good man who is above him. 
The reformer and the criminal are about equally 
obnoxious to the man of average goodness and 
intelligence. The prophets and the betrayers of 
their country are equally odious and promiscuously 
stoned. The Saviour is crucified between two 
thieves. 

The case of the bad man, the problem of sin, 
will be considered later. The progressively good 
man requires interpretation. 

Mr. Benjamin Kidd, in his Social Evolution, has 
brought out with great clearness and force the 
antagonism between the interests of the social 
organism and the interests of its individual mem- 



46 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

bers ; and has gone so far as to assert that we 
never can find " any universal rational sanction for 
individual conduct in a progressive society." He 
recognizes indeed that such sacrifice of individual 
to social interests is the most persistent fact of 
history ; but he explains such conduct by the 
"ultra-rational sanction" of religion. 

The question all turns on what we conceive to 
be the essential nature of man. Is he essentially 
a bundle of animal appetites and passions, sup- 
ported for a little while by a framework of bone ; 
wrapped up for a season in a blanket of flesh ; 
lighted by a flickering candle of intelligence, just 
sufficient to show him the objects by which he 
may gratify these animal appetites and passions ? 
If the appetites are the man and intelligence is 
his adjunct and instrument ; then indeed the an- 
tagonism between such an individual and society is, 
as Mr. Kidd tells us, hopeless and irreconcilable ; 
and the only hope of getting social conduct out of 
him is some " ultra-rational sanction " which shall 
startle him into a wholesome fear of penalties, 
or shock him into a prudent concern for his fate 
in the hereafter. 

Such an abstract individual ; such an animal 
in human form, however, nowhere exists. It is 
a fiction of the imagination, to which no real 



THEOLOGICAL 47 

being corresponds. Units homo, nullns homo. 
One man alone is no man at all. The very 
essence of man is determined by his relations to 
other men and things, and ultimately to the 
Absolute Ground of all relationships. And reason 
is the consciousness of these relations ; and in- 
volves in latent form at least the reverent recogni- 
tion of that ultimate relation. Reason is the 
man ; and the physical nature, with its appe- 
tites and passions, is indeed the essential instru- 
ment and support of the man, but not his essential 
nature. If reason and appetite come into conflict, 
as to some extent they perpetually do, the man 
who will realize his essential self must sacrifice, 
not his reason to his appetite, but his appetite to 
his reason. For this is the better part. Reason 
is not, as Mr. Kidd represents it, "the most pro- 
foundly individualistic, anti-social, anti-evolution- 
ary, and disintegrating of all human qualities." 
Reason is the common bond that binds mankind 
together. The service of society is not, as Mr. 
Kidd assumes, the sacrifice of the individual : it is 
his gratification and realization. Though labour 
leaders and socialistic agitators usually appeal to 
selfishness, yet it is not the selfishness of the 
working men ; it is their nobleness, their fidelity 
to what they believe to be a principle, their loyalty 



48 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

to their order or union or class, which responds to 
these appeals, and gives to strikes and labour 
movements whatever strength they have. It is not 
individualism but a new manifestation of the social 
spirit that is blindly struggling for expression in 
the labour movements of our day. 

Now the good man, whether he is the man of 
average virtue who sacrifices his private gratifica- 
tion in obedience to the law ; or whether he is the 
leader and reformer who sacrifices the good esteem 
of his fellows and the commendation of the exist- 
ing society to promote that better adjustment of 
men and society to each other which is the condi- 
tion of progress ; — the good man in either case 
is simply the man who sees a larger sphere of rea- 
son than the bad man ; who recognizes that this 
larger reason is the expression of his own true 
nature and his better self ; and who faithfully iden- 
tifies himself with the cause of that larger reason 
wherein he sees revealed the fuller possibilities of 
his own rational nature. 

If he sees merely a little fragment of the larger 
truth, and takes that for the whole, and regards 
it as ultimate, as, for example, was the case with 
some of the anti-slavery agitators, and is the case 
with a good many temperance reformers to-day ; 
then he is merely a moral reformer : and probably 



THEOLOGICAL 49 

as he grows older he will grow narrower and 
harder, and ultimately become one of the most 
hide-bound of obstructionists. He has merely set 
one finite bit of truth over against another finite 
bit of truth ; the fact that his bit is a little bigger 
than the bit which he opposes makes him a use- 
ful man as long as the fight is along that particular 
line ; but invariably leaves him a conceited, soured, 
impracticable, and useless man after that particular 
issue is settled. 

If the good man, whether of one type or the 
other, for both are essentially the same, sees the 
social interest for which he sacrifices his private 
gratification, as part of an infinite whole ; if he 
sees the society of which he is a member, or the 
social order he is trying to introduce, as a stage 
in the one continuous process by which men are 
becoming at the same time more perfect in them- 
selves and more perfectly adjusted to each other; 
then he is a religious man, and the victory over 
one private appetite, or the triumph over one pub- 
lic wrong, will make him the more eager and stren- 
uous to attack a new abuse and respond to a new 
duty. Not until we get beyond this or that par- 
ticular application of moral and spiritual law to the 
universal principle of love which is the foundation 
and fulfilment of the law, not until we reach the 

£ 



50 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

standpoint of Jesus, do we reach the ultimate relig- 
ious relation of perfect sonship to God. Morality 
makes a whole of a small part. Religion makes 
the part a member of the great whole. Religion 
is essentially social ; and sonship to God and social 
service are related to each other as the emotional 
and the practical aspects of the same thing. Un- 
selfish service of the social order by the individual 
member is a filial act. It is a revelation of the 
sonship of man to God. 

What then is sonship ? Who is the Son of 
God ? The Son of God is he who, in the cramp- 
ing limitations of space, under the evanescent 
form of time, with the finite instrument of flesh, 
and with the partial knowledge which is conditioned 
by a particular human brain, still sees nature as 
the expression of an omniscient Mind ; beholds 
human society as the unfolding of one universal 
Will ; recognizes every man as the potential re- 
production of the thought and will of the Father ; 
accepts every duty and relationship of life as an 
opportunity to do the will of the Father, and to 
bring men to the consciousness of their sonship to 
God and their brotherhood with each other. Son- 
ship consists in the perception of the Divine Ideal 
in every concrete situation ; and the striving to 
realize that ideal even in the most unideal condi- 



THEOLOGICAL 5 1 

tions. It means the healing of the sick ; the com- 
forting of those in sorrow; the relief of the poor; 
the instruction of the ignorant ; the reproof of the 
wayward ; the exposure of the hypocrite ; the over- 
throw of the extortioner ; the forgiveness of the 
penitent ; the encouragement of the weak ; the 
succour of the tempted ; the emancipation of 
the prisoner ; the solace of mourners at the 
funeral ; the blessing of little children ; the pro- 
vision for the necessities of old age ; the imparting 
of courage to do the work of life and serenity to 
meet the hour of death ; the utterance of truth 
even when it is most unwelcome ; and the doing 
of duty even at the cost of life itself. It is 
the filling of the finite with its infinite signifi- 
cance ; it is the fulfilment of relations in the 
light of their absolute ground ; it is the treatment 
of men in the light of their common sonship to the 
Father ; it is the doing of duty as the reasonable 
requirement of God. 

Such is our a priori conception of what the Son 
of God would be, were he to come into the world. 
Revelation of this sonship has been progressive. 
The lawgiver and the prophet have stood a little in 
advance of their times, and in the name of the 
eternal reason and righteousness have beckoned 
their followers step by step toward juster institu- 



52 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

tions and more humane ideals. Sons of God they 
all have been to whom the word of God has come, 
in so far as they have been conscious that the 
institutions and standards they have set up have 
been grounded in an eternal process of develop- 
ment through which the universal will of God is 
being unfolded in time and expressed in humanity. 
Yet even the prophet, though he recognizes the 
larger reason of which his message is a partial 
declaration, in so far as he fails to catch the spirit 
and grasp the principle of the deeper reason and 
the larger life, remains only half emancipated ; a 
servant rather than a fully conscious son. The 
prophet is great ; but not the greatest. As Jesus 
said of John the Baptist, the burning prophet 
who at the cost of his life proclaimed cer- 
tain fundamental duties in the face of oppres- 
sive power and in the hearing of guilty ears, 
" Among them that are born of women there is 
none greater than John : yet he that is but little 
in the kingdom of God is greater than he." 
Is this conception realized ? Is there a historic 
person who corresponds to this definition ? After 
all the ages of imperfection and laborious prog- 
ress, has the Perfect come ? Has the Son of God 
appeared ? 

The consensus of the competent in spiritual 



THEOLOGICAL 53 

things has been almost unanimous in ascribing 
this title to Jesus of Nazareth. Not always on 
the wisest grounds ; not always with the deepest 
insight; not always with the clearest conceptions 
of the consequences which ought to follow such a 
confession ; the world has accepted him as the 
Son of God, the incarnation of the Divine Truth 
and the revelation of the Father's love. 

The a priori conception of what a Son of God 
should be and the Gospel account of Jesus of Naz- 
areth exactly coincide. Even if it is urged that 
the Gospel narrative is itself an idealized por- 
trayal, that does not destroy its force. Every 
account of a historical character, by the elimina- 
tion of irrelevant detail, by the emphasis upon 
leading traits, by the sacrifice of the insignificant 
and trivial to the essential and the significant, is 
and must be an idealization. But the fundamental 
outlines, even of an ideal representation, must be 
real. No other character ever lived of whose 
teaching and life we know so much, who could 
stand such an idealization without making the in- 
congruity - of the real and the ideal manifest. And if 
it is urged that the Gospel of John is drawn from 
a contemplation of the ideal Son rather than from 
acquaintance with the historic Jesus, still the fact 
that the plain story of the Synoptics and the ideal 



54 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

representation of the Fourth Gospel fit so well 
together is the strongest possible proof that in 
Christ we have the union of the ideal and the real, 
the eternal and the historic, God and man. 

Jesus was tested at all the vital points. The 
lust of the flesh, the fascination of power, the 
pride of life, all presented themselves to his youth- 
ful ambition. And he met them all, not with the 
greater pride of self-sufficient virtue, but with the 
filial humility of one conscious of the Father 
whose commandment he was to obey and whose 
will he was to do. " Man shall not live by bread 
alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of 
the mouth of God." "Thou shalt worship the 
Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve." 

The appeal of innocent childhood, the claim of 
sickness, the necessities of the poor, the misery 
of the social outcast, the sadder tale of guilt and 
shame, all were presented to him ; and he met 
them aH with that tenderness and helpfulness and 
sympathy and forgiveness which a human father 
bestows upon his child, and which he declared 
the Heavenly Father bestows on all his children. 

On the other hand, he met hypocrisy with expos- 
ure, crafty questions with more crafty refutations. 
He pricked the bubble of conceit and laid bare the 
hideous features of pride wherever he found them. 



THEOLOGICAL 55 

He held fast to the nothingness of all that is not 
rooted and grounded in God. " Every plant which 
my heavenly Father planted not shall be rooted 
up." He refused to act from motives of personal 
prudence ; rejecting such counsel with the words, 
" Get thee behind me, Satan : for thou art a stum- 
blingblock unto me : for thou mindest not the 
things of God, but the things of men." He based 
all greatness on humility and service, and taught 
that the standard of forgiveness is not finite en- 
durance but infinite love. " Whosoever shall 
humble himself as this little child, the same is 
the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." "I say 
not unto thee, Until seven times ; but, Until 
seventy times seven." 

He scorned flattery ; had none of that self- 
conscious goodness to which flattery appeals, and 
which we all despise. A young man once tried it. 
He came and kneeled to him and called him good. 
Jesus promptly asked him, " Why do you call me 
' good ' ? There is only one who is good, that is 
God." This passage has puzzled the commenta- 
tors, intent on making out for Jesus an artificial 
and ready-made divinity. But rightly understood, 
it reveals the simplicity and modesty and genu- 
ineness of Jesus' character as no other text in 
Scripture does ; and lifts him clear up out of the 



56 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

level of ordinary human virtue with its pride and 
conceit and self-consciousness onto the divine level 
of a love that is so devoted to its object and its 
work that it does not stop to think of self at all. 

The way to become conscious of one's own 
personal goodness, and to impress the sense of it 
upon others, had been reduced to a very elaborate 
system in Jesus' day. The Pharisees were mas- 
ters of this precious and proper and precise good- 
ness, which knows just how good it is and how it 
came to be so : and Jesus treated the whole 
miserable business with contempt ; telling his 
disciples that if they could not develop a better 
type of piety than that, he had no use for them. 

Jesus took for his task nothing less than the 
gigantic work of stripping religion of all its coun- 
terfeits and superfluities ; of teaching each indi- 
vidual to revere and love the Author of his being 
as his Father and his Friend ; of training each 
individual to regard every other person as his 
brother, with rights to be respected and interests 
to be served as generously and faithfully as if 
they were one's own. Thus he made the service 
of God so simple and so real that a child might 
be sure of the heavenly Father's favour as often 
as he tried to do right and was sorry for having 
done wrong, and the life of man so noble and so 



THEOLOGICAL 57 

sweet that even the humblest might share its 
highest privileges and holiest joys. He believed 
in a living God, now working in the world ; and 
he accepted it as his mission to work with him. 
" My Father worketh even until now, and I 
work. We must work the work of him that sent 
me, while it is day ; the night cometh when no 
man can work." 

He was the friend of publicans and sinners ; 
measuring his service not by the deserts but by 
the needs of his fellows ; following the example 
of the Father who maketh his sun to rise on the 
evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just 
and the unjust. He met opposition with deter- 
mination, endured indignities with serenity, and 
faced death with courage. When told that Herod 
desired to kill him and advised to "get out and 
go hence," he replied, " Go and say to that fox, 
Behold I cast out devils and perform cures to-day 
and to-morrow; and the third day I am perfected. 
Howbeit I must go on my way to-day and to- 
morrow and the day following." 

He would have no compromise with fraud and 
wrong. He found the temple service formal, 
mercenary, extortionate. It was in the hands 
of a pontifical clique, an ecclesiastical ring, 
that had elaborated an expensive ritual, and 



58 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

then formed a monopoly in the means for its 
observance. Out of the charges, commissions, 
and brokerage incidental to this worship they 
were making a luxurious living for themselves. 
By this manipulation of public worship for private 
profit the chief-priests and their confederates 
had acquired wealth, and the power and influ- 
ence wealth knows how to buy. 

This whole system was the exact opposite of 
that immediate trust in a loving Father which 
Jesus felt in his own heart, and was striving to 
impart to men. Conflict was inevitable ; and 
Jesus saw clearly what would be the outcome. 
On the one side was venerated custom, sacred 
precedent, established authority, and all the ma- 
chinery to make authority effective, intrenched 
in the temple at the nation's capital. On the 
other hand he stood alone, with his little band 
of half-trained pupils from an obscure and de- 
spised province. And yet, knowing perfectly 
well that attack on the party in power meant 
death to himself, what did he do ? " And he 
found in the temple those that sold oxen and 
sheep and doves, and the changers of money, 
sitting ; and he made a scourge of cords, and 
cast all out of the temple, both the sheep and 
the oxen ; and he poured out the changers' 



THEOLOGICAL 59 

money, and overthrew their tables ; and to them 
that sold doves he said, Take these things 
hence ; make not my Father's house a house of 
merchandise." 

We know the consequence. We know how he 
refused to demean himself before the Roman 
Procurator, to save his life ; how almost with 
his last breath he made thoughtful provision 
for his mother in the home of his best friend ; 
and died pitying the ignorance and praying for 
the forgiveness of his murderers. 

Make your conception of what the Son of God 
should be as high as you please. Put into it all 
you have known or can conceive of righteousness, 
and love, and truth, and tenderness, and constancy, 
and courage ; and you cannot put into it a single 
trait of moral character, a single quality of spiritual 
grace, a single principle of social service which has 
not its counterpart and its embodiment in the 
Gospel story of Jesus' life and death. 

He did the grandest work ever conceived by 
man ; he did it in the spirit of gentleness and 
tenderness to all whom he could help and bless ; 
he did it in defiance of all that corrupt influence 
and unscrupulous power could bring against him ; 
he did it in the serene certainty that it would 
cost his life. 



60 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

If the doing of beneficent work with constancy 
and courage, in kindness and in love ; if the stren- 
uous resistance of unrighteous power, even unto 
blood ; if the faithful witness to the truth in the 
face of hypocrisy, and fidelity to duty in the hour 
of death ; — if these are our conceptions of how 
God would manifest himself in human history if 
he were to manifest himself at all ; then Jesus 
has the obvious right to be accepted and wor- 
shipped as the Son of God ; the authentic revela- 
tion and perfect incarnation of the divine in 
human history and human form. 

This title, Son of God, was not the one which 
Jesus gave himself. In the Synoptic Gospels he 
does not use it once, although he speaks of him- 
self as the Son of Man sixty-nine times. It is a 
title which his life and character drew forth from 
those who witnessed it and undertook to interpret 
it. " Truly," says the centurion, "this was the 
Son of God." So says the Fourth Gospel, in its 
attempt to give the historic person his ideal and 
eternal setting. So has replied the faith of eighteen 
centuries. 

The perfection of humanity is the revelation of 
divinity. Christ is the fulness of the Godhead 
bodily : all of the divine nature and spirit that can 
be manifested in human form. Christ is the God- 



THEOLOGICAL 6 1 

man. He reveals at the same time how human is 
the heart of God, and how divine may be the life 
of man. His divinity is not a remote inference 
from the fulfilment of prediction and the exhibi- 
tion of signs and wonders. It is the manifesta- 
tion of those moral virtues and spiritual graces ; 
it is the exemplification of those social principles 
and ethical laws which we all recognize as the 
principles on which the world is founded and the 
laws on which society must rest. In revealing 
the ideal or end toward which humanity is pro- 
gressing, and in which society will find its ultimate 
realization, he at the same time reveals the divine 
purpose which was in the beginning, by which and 
for which the world was created. What is last in 
the order of time is first in the order of thought. 
That the Son realizes the purpose of the Father in 
the process of time, shows that he was with the 
Father in the beginning. 

As the whole life and activity of the Son would 
be inexplicable without the Father, whose will the 
Son does, and whose messenger he is, so the 
Father would not be a social and spiritual being, 
that is he would not be a person, without the 
eternal Son, or Logos, in whom to take delight, 
through whom to express his purpose, and in 
whom to find that relationship of self to not 



62 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

self, without which personality is but an empty 
shadow. 

When we spoke of the Absolute as our Father 
in the last chapter, it was hardly warranted by 
the stage of development our thought had there 
reached. It was an anticipation ; though an an- 
ticipation which the ancient world had made before 
Christ came. That God is our Father we might 
discover by reflecting on our own dependence and 
relativity. What God is, what fatherhood means, 
we can only know through the perfect embodiment 
of his loving will in the person of his well-beloved 
Son. "No man hath seen God at any time ; the 
only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the 
Father, he hath declared him." 

By virtue of his perfect obedience Christ is God 
in humanity. He is the Mediator between God 
and man. He that hath seen me, hath seen the 
Father. He that receiveth me, receiveth him 
that sent me. No man cometh unto the Father 
but by me. My Father and I are one. Things 
equal to the same thing are equal to each 
other. Lines parallel to the same straight line 
are parallel to each other. Contact with a good 
conductor of the electric current is equivalent 
to contact with the battery which generates 
the current. Learning from the perfectly intelli- 



THEOLOGICAL 63 

gent and sympathetic and competent pupil is 
equivalent to learning from the original teacher. 
All we know of the spiritual nature of God comes 
to us in its complete form and in its ultimate 
principle in the person of Jesus Christ. 

The attempt to approach God apart from 
Christ, to conceive God otherwise than through 
the expression he has made of himself in Christ, 
involves either an impoverishment and indefi- 
niteness in the conception of God ; or else it 
involves the ascription to him of attributes 
which Christ revealed, without acknowledging 
the medium through which the revelation came. 
The former course is intellectually more con- 
sistent ; but it is spiritually fatal. After a gen- 
eration or two this tendency fades out into 
mysticism, evaporates into pantheism, or shrivels 
up into hard, dry rationalism. The latter ten- 
dency is intellectually inconsistent ; but it explains 
the fact that some of the most devout and earnest 
Christians of the present day are to be found 
among those who have dropped from their formal 
creed the doctrine of the divinity of Christ. 

The Unitarian objection to the doctrine of the 
divinity of Christ is forcibly stated in the fol- 
lowing passage from a sermon by the Rev. J. T. 
Sunderland, on the subject, " Was Jesus God ? " 



64 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

" A God pinched and compressed into the limit 
of our finite humanity, becomes thereby of neces- 
sity a very meagre and small God. Jesus, born as 
a babe, and in a few years dying ; during his boy- 
hood growing in knowledge as you and I do ; after 
he was a man sometimes disappointed ; trying to 
accomplish ends, and again and again failing be- 
cause of opposition ; declaring that there were 
some things that he did not know; — furnishes a 
picture of a God so meagre, so inadequate, so like 
the little gods that the heathen believe in, that 
we instinctively push it aside, and demand for our 
worship something infinitely higher and larger — 
lifted wholly out of the category of this finiteness." 

At first sight this line of objection seems irrefut- 
able. It seems to reduce the belief in the divinity 
of Christ to the most absurd product of childish 
credulity. Apparently, the believers in the divin- 
ity of Christ are guilty of imposing on God the 
most cramping and confining of limitations. 

In reality, the objector himself is subjecting the 
conception of God to the most serious and fatal of 
all limitations. He is denying to God the power 
of appearing in finite form ; of revealing himself 
in terms of humanity. A God thus incapable 
of self-revelation would be the most impotent and 
useless being conceivable. He would be no God 



THEOLOGICAL 65 

at all. He would be merely the unknowable 
abstraction of agnosticism. We have no predi- 
cates, save such as we draw from our finite 
experience. God must be known in terms of 
nature and humanity, or else he cannot be 
known at all. As Professor Andrew Seth has 
said, " We speak most truly, and most in accord- 
ance with the real nature of things, when we 
characterize the Absolute in terms of the best we 
know." Jesus Christ is the best we know or can 
conceive of moral and spiritual excellence. There- 
fore, either Christ must be the revelation and 
incarnation of God to us, or else God will be to 
our thinking a mere name ; and his attributes 
will all resolve themselves into sesquipedalian 
negations. 

The true Infinite does not dwell remote and 
inaccessible, in some immaterial realm of pure 
ideas, like that with which Plato endeavoured to 
solve the problem of the rationality of the universe. 
Goethe is right when he says, "Wer grosses 
will muss sich beschranken konnen." Greatness 
depends on definiteness and limitation. As Goethe 
says again: 

"Willst du ins Unendliche schreiten, 
Geh nur im Endlichen nach alien Seiten." 

The only Infinite we can conceive is to be found in 



66 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

the symmetrical fulfilment of finite relationships. 
We seem to be paying the highest compliments 
to God when we try to " lift him wholly out of the 
category of this finiteness." The difficulty is that 
when we have gone through the list of these doubt- 
ful and negative compliments, there remains nothing 
definite, or conceivable, or knowable, or lovable, or 
worshipful, to which our thought and devotion and 
worship can direct itself. In our excessive polite- 
ness we have bowed our God out of the universe. 
In denying him the possibility of manifestation in 
the limitations and finitude of humanity, we have 
reduced our conception of him to that abstract 
being which is the same thing as nothing. 

Unitarianism has been of immense service as 
a critic of the extravagances and excrescences of 
orthodox tradition. In performing this service it 
has, in great measure, made the fatal mistake of 
accepting the deistic conception of God. Unita- 
rianism has helped to save others : itself it cannot 
save. Between acceptance of the incarnation 
and agnosticism there are several way-stations 
where the practical worker may tarry and the 
devout spirit may rest. But between these two 
positions there is no permanent and enduring 
philosophical foundation on which one can rear 
a consistent and positive conception of a personal 



THEOLOGICAL 6y 

God. One might as well try to see the sun by 
closing his eyes to the rays of light which pro- 
ceed from it ; one might as well try to get at the 
thought of an author by refusing to read the book 
he has written ; as try to think of God's spiritual 
nature in other terms than those which are ex- 
pressed in the personality of Christ. 

Belief in the divinity of Christ does not rest on 
such narratives as the accounts of the " Gospel of 
the Infancy," introduced into the opening chapters 
of Matthew and Luke ; and is entirely independent 
of the question whether we interpret these narra- 
tives as fact or fancy, poetry or prose. Any attempt 
to base the belief in the divinity of Christ on the 
miraculous is sure to alienate multitudes of honest 
minds ; who will thus be led to regard it as simply 
one among the many deifications of saints and 
heroes with which the legends of antiquity abound. 

The greater portion of the signs and wonders 
which the Gospel narrative attributes to Jesus, 
are much more credible now than they were 
twenty or thirty years ago. We see that they 
involve of necessity no violation of law ; but sim- 
ply the introduction of higher forms of force. 
The law of gravitation is not violated when chemi- 
cal affinity lifts up what gravitation tends to pull 
down. The law of chemical affinity is not violated 



68 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

when the vital force in the root-hair of a plant 
breaks apart what chemical affinity tends to hold 
together. Physiological law is not violated when 
mental influences produce results the exact oppo- 
site of what physiological conditions alone tend 
to produce. The phenomena of hypnotism ; the 
various forms of mental therapeutics ; and many 
other phenomena which psychical research is 
bringing to light, render it impossible to deny 
that a unique personality might heal physical, 
mental, and moral disease, and even appear after 
death to the sight of those who had intensely 
loved him. Yet just in proportion as the credi- 
bility of signs and wonders is increased, their 
evidential value is diminished. The argument for 
the divinity of Christ from prophecy and miracles 
is absolutely destitute of cogency for the repre- 
sentative modern mind. Miracles are at best 
merely the scaffolding or decoration, not the 
foundation and substance of Christian faith. 
Ten times the miracles ascribed to Jesus, sup- 
ported by ten times the evidence, would not be 
sufficient to convince us that Nero was the Son 
of God. 

The divinity of Christ is merely a question of 
the agreement of two conceptions : the conception 
of the spiritual character and will of God ; and 



THEOLOGICAL 69 

the historic narrative of the life and work of Jesus 
Christ. That the Father is greater than the Son 
is evident. But that in the moral and spiritual 
points in which the two can coincide they agree ; 
this is all that the believers in Christ's divinity 
affirm. If there is an essential spiritual attribute 
known to us of God which Jesus did not embody 
in his life and express in his teaching ; if on the 
other hand there is a single authentic trait or prac- 
tice in the character and life of Jesus which falls 
below our ideal of divineness of character and con- 
duct; then, indeed, we shall have to agree that 
Jesus is merely a man like other men, not only in 
natural endowments but in spiritual attainments. 

If, however, these two conceptions coincide ; if 
Father and Son are correlative terms ; then to 
ignore or to deny the divinity and Sonship of 
Christ is to deny God ; or at best to substitute for 
the concrete and personal revelation he has made 
of himself in history some vague abstraction of the 
philosophic mind. It is to go back to Paganism 
without the charm of its mythology ; or to em- 
brace positivism with the most precious fact in 
history eliminated, and the most attractive per- 
son in the race dethroned. It is to return to 
the vagueness and generality in which our first 
chapter left us. 



JO SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

The supra-personal God of philosophic specula- 
tion will never win the heart and mould the will 
of the masses of mankind to the finer issues of 
the spiritual life. He who is to rule the human 
heart must be himself human ; touched with the 
feeling of our infirmities ; tempted in all points 
like as we are. Such a Lord and Master, such a 
Son of God, the world has found in Jesus Christ. 
Shall we not, as Robert Browning says : 

"Call Christ, then, the illimitable God? 1 ' 

"The very God! think, Abib ; dost thou think? 
So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too — 
So through the thunder comes a human voice 
Saying, ' O heart I made, a heart beats here ! 
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself ! 
Thou hast no power nor may'st conceive of mine, 
But love I gave thee, with myself to love, 
And thou must love me who hast died for thee. 111 



CHAPTER III 

THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL THE 

HOLY SPIRIT 

By nature man is the descendant of unnumbered 
animal ancestors, who have been slowly trans- 
formed through successive eons of geological time. 
Physically he is but a slight relative modification 
of the highest apes. Mentally he depends upon 
an essentially similar, though much more complex 
brain and nervous system. All his physical appe- 
tites and passions are common to him with the 
lower animals. 

One power, however, which they lack he has. 
As Locke puts it, " Brutes abstract not." To 
single out the essential principle from its acci- 
dental embodiment ; to deal with general ideas ; 
to see things in their relations to each other as 
distinct from their relations to the individual per- 
cipient ; to become identified with a wide range 
of objective interests ; to transcend one's own 
petty individuality, and live as a conscious mem- 
ber of a social whole ; this, as Romanes has 

71 



72 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

conclusively shown, beyond its faintest instinc- 
tive anticipations is impossible to the animal 
and is the exclusive prerogative of man. 

Yet, while possible for man, this larger life is 
not natural ; in the sense that it is the course 
toward which his impulses urge him. It is not 
the line of least resistance. For reason in its 
highest form is a late acquisition of the race; 
while the animal appetites and passions have tens 
of thousands of years of heredity behind them ; 
and many of them were the conditions of survival 
by which the race was saved from extinction in 
earlier stages of the struggle for existence. 

To be sure there is a second principle, which 
Professor Drummond calls the struggle for the life 
of others, developing side by side with the strug- 
gle for individual life. Yet the altruistic or re- 
productive principle in the animal is as blind 
and instinctive, as little ethical and consciously 
rational, as is the egoistic principle. It is ulti- 
mately grounded in the physical necessity which 
compels a growing cell to divide in order to secure 
wall-surface sufficient for its bulk. And though 
this reproductive principle is the soil in which 
the social virtues have been nourished, yet it is so 
far from being sufficient of itself to support them 
that in man the most selfish and cruel and loath- 



THEOLOGICAL 73 

some of his vices spring from the abuse and 
perversion of this very function. 

Making all due allowance for instinctive altru- 
ism, and the altruistic anticipations wrapped up 
in reproduction and maternity, the fact remains 
that it is natural for each individual to look out 
for number one. Looking out for the interest 
of number one may, indeed, involve gratifications 
of appetite, indulgences of passion, which benefit 
number two and number three ; but such inci- 
dental benefits are to be credited to the benefi- 
cent tendency of things rather than to the social 
virtue of the individual. Call it with Darwin 
the survival of tendencies once necessary in the 
struggle for existence, but no longer so ; call it 
with Kant the bad principle in human nature ; 
call it with Calvin total depravity and original 
sin ; call it with the refined selfishness, or with 
the vulgar meanness ; call it with the Bible sin ; 
the fact remains that the principle of life with 
which we all start out and which we find it 
easiest to follow is a tendency to assert the 
interest of the individual as against the interest 
of others and of society, whenever the two in- 
terests conflict. 

As we saw in our last chapter, Mr. Kidd is 
right in his assertion that there is no rational 



74 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

sanction for social conduct, provided you assume 
that the individual is complete in himself. And 
that is precisely the assumption which nature is 
constantly prompting each one of us to make. 

Our interminable line of animal ancestry, and 
the fact that each child reproduces in himself the 
main features of historic evolution, give to the 
selfish, individualistic principle the start to begin 
with, and the inside track throughout the entire 
course of the moral race. " That is not first 
which is spiritual, but that which is natural ; then 
that which is spiritual." The raw material of life 
comes to us in the form of sensuous impulses ; 
which in themselves are neither good or bad ; 
but may become either, according to the uses 
that we make of them. 

Now the outcome of such a state of nature 
in which each man should do what unrestrained 
nature prompts, would be intolerable. We should 
have a state of internecine strife. As Hobbes, 
who has most clearly depicted the consequences 
of unrestrained nature, declares, possession would 
be precarious, life insecure, and the whole life 
of man would be " solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, 
short." Some other principle must come into life 
than the raw material of selfish impulse, if life 
is to be tolerable, and society is to endure. 



THEOLOGICAL 75 

Over against the natural stands the spiritual. 
By virtue of his reason man can transcend the 
immediate impulses of his animal nature ; he can 
represent to himself the interests of others as equal 
to his own in reality and worth ; he can merge 
his private self in the larger life of society, and 
compel his natural impulses to obey the dictates 
of reason and serve the wider interests which 
reason represents. The spiritual life, therefore, is 
the realization of reason ; while the natural life is 
the gratification of appetite. In the eye of reason 
selfishness is an illusion. Selfishness says these 
keen appetites and hot passions of mine are the 
things of supreme moment in the world. They 
alone are urgent, vital, peremptory. Reason says 
there are thousands of beings whose appetites and 
passions are of just as much consequence to them 
as mine are to me. Furthermore, reason points 
out that the promiscuous gratification of appetite 
and passion would bring but a short-lived and pre- 
carious pleasure, while it would inflict permanent 
and irretrievable pain. All this even the hedonist 
admits. Reason, however, goes a step further, and 
declares that it has pleasures of its own. Reason 
demands that its own ideal of a harmonious and 
mutually helpful social organism shall be made 
real ; and it declares that the consciousness of 



76 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

being a worthy member of the social organism is 
of itself a nobler and higher satisfaction than the 
poor, petty, sensuous indulgences which it bids us 
sacrifice. Spirit is reason realized in personality. 
The spiritual life is the universal life ; the life 
determined by reason. 

The spiritual first presents itself as the merely 
prudential. Natural impulse aims only at the im- 
mediate present. Reason soon discovers that the 
gratification of separate impulses in successive 
moments conflict. A happy to-day may be bought 
too dearly if it brings a wretched to-morrow. A 
frivolous and rollicking youth may not be worth 
the premature and disconsolate old age it invari- 
ably brings. Reason demands that to-day and to- 
morrow, youth and old age, shall be so related to 
each other that the outcome shall be a consistent 
and satisfactory whole. Reason presents the ideal 
of the whole of life as the standard by which to 
test the worth of each constituent part. This 
substitution of the happiness of a lifetime for 
the pleasure of the moment, this rise from the 
Cyrenaic to the Epicurean view, is the first stage 
in the spiritualizing of life. 

The maxims of Theognis, the proverbs of Solo- 
mon, the counsels of Benjamin Franklin in Poor 
Richard *s Almanac, are literary expressions of this 



THEOLOGICAL 77 

spiritual stage. It will repay us to examine care- 
fully what is involved in this first effort of reason 
to regulate life. My immediate present appetite is 
all that nature or sense presents to me at this par- 
ticular moment. To-morrow is not real to-day. 
Old age is not an actual fact present to the sen- 
suous experience of the youth. To-morrow and 
old age are not facts of sense, but ideal representa- 
tions of reason. They do not exist in the actual 
world which sense now presses upon me. They 
are parts of the larger world in which reason tells 
me this sensuous present is but a single and rela- 
tively unimportant fragment. Reason, therefore, 
bids me subordinate this fleeting and fragmentary 
present to the total and abiding life. Reason bids 
us treat the moment, not as an isolated self-suffi- 
cient thing, but as an element in a larger whole. 
It bids us rise from the temporal to the eternal 
point of view. It bids us treat the ideal future as 
of equal worth with existing present fact. 

Now we have only to carry this same process 
one step farther to get the ultimate spiritual life. 
Add the absent in space to the absent in time ; 
make what is actual in the experience of people 
outside of us in space as real and regulative a con- 
sideration in our conduct as what is inwardly pres- 
ent in our own personal experience ; and we have 



?8 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

the insight which shows our individual lives as 
members of the great life of the world. Then 
from the point of view of reason we shall behold 
our little selves as they really are ; members of the 
one great life of society. To recognize that my 
neighbour is as real as myself is the second stage 
of the spiritual life. Professor Royce has put this 
matter very clearly. " Thy neighbour is as actual, 
as concrete, as thou art. Just as thy future is real, 
though not now thine, so thy neighbour is real, 
though his thoughts never are thy thoughts. If 
he is real like thee, then is his life as bright a 
light, as warm a fire, to him, as thine to thee ; 
his will is as full of struggling desires, of hard 
problems, of fateful decisions ; his pains are as 
hateful, his joys as dear. Take whatever thou 
knowest of desire and of striving, of burning love 
and fierce hatred, realize as fully as thou canst 
what that means, and then with clear certainty 
add : Such as that is for me, so it is for him, noth- 
ing less. In all the songs of the forest birds ; in 
all the cries of the wounded and dying, struggling 
in the captor's power ; in the boundless sea, where 
the myriads of water-creatures strive and die ; 
amid all the countless hordes of savage men ; in 
the hearts of all the good and loving ; in the dull, 
throbbing hearts of all prisoners and captives ; in 



THEOLOGICAL 79 

all sickness and sorrow ; in all exultation and hope ; 
in all our devotion ; in all our knowledge, — every- 
where from the lowest to the noblest creatures and 
experiences of our earth, the same conscious, burn- 
ing wilful life is found, endlessly manifold as the 
forms of living creatures, unquenchable as the fires 
of the sun, real as these impulses that even now 
throb in thy own little selfish heart. Lift up thy 
eyes, behold that life, and then turn away and for- 
get it as thou canst ; but if thou hast known that, 
thou hast begun to know thy duty." 

The third stage of the spiritual life is the neces- 
sary complement of the second. For these other 
wills of whose reality reason and reflection make 
us aware, are in competition and conflict. Just as 
the isolated appetites of the individual conflict 
with each other, and can be solved only as they 
are subordinated to a permanent ideal of life as a 
whole ; and as this individual ideal could be found 
only in relation to the other wills with whom we 
stand in social relations ; so the individual wills of 
men are in strife and antagonism; and that strife 
can be harmonized only as we rise to the point 
where we can see them in the light of the one 
universal will. To give everybody just what they 
want is neither possible nor desirable ; even after 
you have come to appreciate what their wants are. 



80 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

To give them what is best as distinct from what is 
most desired, is the spiritual problem. And this 
involves having an ideal of their social relations 
and social condition. The ideal is social. It is 
universal. It carries us back to the universal 
thought and will ; and shows us that what we 
found to be a necessity of thought is an equally 
imperative necessity for conduct. 

The spirit of social service is the Holy Spirit. 
The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father ; for if 
there were no absolute and eternal thought and 
will binding all men together in the unity of one 
conception and one purpose ; then it would be 
"ultra-rational," absurd, to live a life in which 
the social good should be the aim of individual en- 
deavour. The Holy Spirit is the realization of the 
will of God in the life of humanity. The Holy 
Spirit also " proceeds from the Son," as the later 
creed rightly affirms ; for without the example and 
inspiration of one to whom the Spirit was given 
without measure, and who embodies the perfec- 
tion of the Father's will and manifests the com- 
pleteness of the principle of social service, the 
reproduction of the divine life among frail, finite 
men would have been feeble, fickle, and fragmen- 
tary. The Holy Spirit is Christ multiplied into 
individuals, and reproduced in institutions. The 



THEOLOGICAL 8 1 

Holy Spirit is the fellowship of the many brethren 
among whom Christ is the first-born. 

The Holy Spirit is equally divine with the 
Father and the Son ; and with them is to be wor- 
shipped and glorified. The same reasoning which 
makes the Son equal to the Father in all spiritual 
things, makes the Holy Spirit equal to both. 
Jesus said not only, " He that receiveth me receiv- 
eth him that sent me " ; but also, " He that receiv- 
eth you receiveth me." If the purpose to establish 
in humanity a kingdom of love and mutual good-will 
is the essential thought and will of the Father ; 
then he who came to make that purpose actual in 
history by his teaching, his example, and his inspi- 
ration — in other words, the Christ — is also divine, 
for he is the embodiment in outward fact of what 
God is in inmost thought. And if the revelation 
of this thought and the doing of this will makes 
Christ divine ; then the life of every individual 
man who receives this thought into his mind and 
makes this purpose the object of his will becomes 
therein a recipient of the life and spirit of God ; 
a temple in whom the Holy Spirit dwells. And 
the Spirit of God dwelling in the hearts and lives 
of men is no less divine than the thought and will 
which this Spirit embodies ; no less divine than 
the historic person through whom in its fulness 



82 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

and completeness this same thought and will first 
became manifest. 

The Holy Spirit is the thought of God, the life 
of Christ, reproduced in those who obey God and 
follow Christ. As Jesus promised his disciples, 
" He shall be in you." And God in man is in no 
wise inferior to God in nature ; God unfolding his 
thought and working out his purpose through in- 
dividuals in time is not inferior to God abiding 
in his perfect thought throughout eternity. 

Yes : the Holy Spirit is of the same essence as 
the Father, as the old creeds profoundly teach. 
If this is meaningless jargon to modern ears, it 
is because we have missed the intimate relation 
in which God stands to man and man to God. 
As Dr. Bushnell said a generation ago: "We 
think of the Holy Spirit as of some impersonal 
force, some hidden fire, some holy gale, not such 
a Spirit as, living in us, keeps the sensibilities 
even of Gethsemane and the passion in immediate 
contact with our inmost life." The Holy Spirit is 
the meeting-point between the actuality of God 
and the possibility of man. Just in so far as we 
rise above the crude, selfish impulses of our imme- 
diate animal nature, to that precise extent does 
God come down into us, and make his abode with 
us. And the indwelling God, the self-transcend- 



THEOLOGICAL 83 

ing life of social service, is the presence of the 
Holy Spirit in our hearts and lives. To deny 
the divinity of the Son and the Spirit, is to 
reduce the conception of God to that of a 
blank, self-identical nonentity ; to banish him 
from the whole course of history and the entire 
sphere of reality ; and to leave man without 
reliable guidance or personal inspiration in the 
spiritual life. In place of a living, growing con- 
sciousness of a personal Father, a personal Mas- 
ter, a personal Companion ; such a denial drives 
man into a blind acceptance of unverified tradi- 
tion ; a perfunctory observance of unintelligible 
rites ; or a rationalistic reliance upon cold hard 
crumbs of finite fact, to give to life its lost sem- 
blance of an infinite significance. 

In succeeding chapters we have considered the 
Father, the Son, and the Spirit as distinct objects 
of thought, reached by distinct lines of reflection. 
The Father is the Absolute Ground of the phe- 
nomena of nature and the progressive movement 
of history. The Son is the incarnation of the 
divine in humanity and the champion of the ideal 
in its conquest of reality. The Holy Spirit is the 
Helper and Comforter without whose presence our 
aspiration to overcome the appetites of our nature 
would be irrational and our efforts vain. 



84 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

These three are one. Unless there be a Father 
whose thought and will include the right relations 
of all beings to each other, there can be no Son, 
who finds it his meat and drink to do the Father's 
will. Unless, on the other hand, there be a true 
and real and eternal Son, through whom this will is 
done, the will of the Father remains nothing but a 
pale, unsubstantial shadow, hovering in the back- 
ground of speculative thought. The Father mani- 
fests himself through the Son ; and the Son exists 
in the Father. 

Unless there be an eternal Son, who embodies 
the perfect ideal of human life, no Divine Spirit, 
conscious of oneness with the Father, can dwell 
with men ; but all our moral aspiration and social 
endeavour would remain a blind striving after the 
unknown and the unattainable. And on the other 
hand, unless such an indwelling of the Spirit oe 
possible to us, then Christ becomes an unintelligi- 
ble projection into history of an alien being. 

Each is interpreted through the other. The 
evidence presented in the first chapter for the 
being of God must have seemed to the thoughtful 
reader inadequate, inconclusive. So it is. Only 
through the Son do we know the Father. The 
Spirit in ourselves is the only infallible witness of 
his existence. And all our subsequent study of 



THEOLOGICAL 85 

the working of the Spirit in the hearts of men and 
in the institutions of society will be the confirma- 
tion of the evidence which in the first chapter 
could be presented only in its abstract, metaphysi- 
cal form. Theology is a circle. Each part of it 
tells something about all the rest. We might 
begin almost anywhere : but in any case we 
should find the first steps difficult ; for until we 
have seen the whole circle we cannot rightly 
appreciate the necessity and significance of any 
part. The divinity of Christ, taken as an isolated 
proposition, is incapable of proof. Unless we 
bring to our interpretation of the person of Christ 
the conception of the Father's loving will for all 
his children on the one hand, and the conception 
of the Holy Spirit prompting us to social service 
on the other hand, we cannot form a worthy con- 
ception of Christ as the Son of God. And in 
like manner, the Holy Spirit will never be to us 
anything more than a name signifying something 
mysterious, a mere "Ghost," as the English re- 
visers insisted that he shall continue to be called, 
until we recognize the life of social service in 
ourselves as an embodiment of the eternal love 
of the Father, and as a reproduction in us of the 
life of his well beloved Son. 



Part II 
ANTHROPOLOGICAL 



CHAPTER IV 

SIN AND LAW JUDGMENT 

It is impossible to separate God from man, 
or man from God. They are correlative terms. 
Hitherto we have been considering God as his 
relation to man discloses him. Henceforth we 
shall consider man as he is determined by his 
relation to God. Already we have seen that 
man is a relative, finite, dependent being. In 
that fact as such no evil is involved. But a finite 
being endowed with self-consciousness and free- 
dom, is capable of attempting to assert his inde- 
pendence ; and to set up his own finite being as 
self-sufficient. Again we saw that in the progress 
toward the perfect it is possible for man to carry 
forward survivals of lower stages of development 
into higher stages ; and so to transform a primi- 
tive virtue into a present vice. Again we saw 
that impulses, appetites, and passions which are 
harmless and even beneficial from the natural 
standpoint of the individual, are inconsistent with 
the social well-being, which it is the essence of 
the spiritual life to recognize and further. 

89 



90 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

These are all aspects of the fall to which a 
finite individual, placed in the midst of a social 
order which is constantly changing, is liable. 
This assertion of the finite against the Infinite, 
of past permissions against present ideals, of 
the individual interest against social well-being, is 
sin. Its specific forms are as numerous as the 
relations in which man stands ; as various as the 
lines on which society is advancing ; as multitu- 
dinous as the points at which individual and 
social interests touch. It is the province of 
ethics to trace out in detail the special forms of 
virtue and vice which result from the fulfilment 
or the violation of these relations. Religion is 
concerned with the single principle which is 
common to all the particular cases. 

All self-assertion of the individual against the 
social order, and against God as the author and per- 
fecter of the social order, is sin. Sin is the attempt 
of the individual to set himself up as the lord of his 
little world ; when it manifests itself as pride and 
vanity. Sin is the clinging to antiquated customs 
and inherited rights, and traditional views, after 
they have ceased to represent existing facts and 
promote social well-being ; when it takes the form 
of bigotry and hypocrisy. Sin is the attempt of 
the individual to take advantage of the imperfect 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 9 1 

institutions, or the imperfect knowledge, or the 
unequal opportunities of his fellows in order to 
make private gain out of their loss ; when it takes 
the form of meanness and dishonesty. Sin is the 
willingness to secure something for myself with- 
out rendering society an equivalent. Sin is the 
disposition to make in my own favour exceptions 
to the just and impartial law of God. Sin is the 
disposition to treat other people as means to our 
own ends ; instead of recognizing both others and 
ourselves as alike means and ends in one common 
social order. 

Sin is an original principle in human nature. 
By virtue of our fmitude we must be conscious 
of our own private desires, before we can be 
equally alive to the desires and claims of others. 
The "good" child who always minds when he 
is spoken to ; who always observes the proprie- 
ties ; who never gets angry ; who never makes 
too much noise ; who never fights, will not 
make the strongest type of man. /Real good- 
ness is good for something. Real regard for 
others implies intense likes and dislikes of one's 
own. And the boy who does not assert his 
own rights and fight his own battles when a 
boy, will be unable to protect the rights and 
fight the battles of others when he is a man. 



92 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

The servant of others must first have served 
himself. The development of the child is a re- 
production of the evolution of the race. Had 
there been no tiger in our ancestors, we should 
not be civilized men to-day. Our mild virtues 
would have stood us in poor stead in the fierce 
struggle for existence which our savage ancestors 
fought out for us in the primeval forests. Our 
altruism rests on the deep and obscure founda- 
tion of their fierce egoism. Had our ancestors 
been of gentler temper, we should not have been 
at all. 

The doctrine of original sin does not find favour 
with that sentimental mood which just now hap- 
pens to be dominant in religious thought ; but the 
modern historical conception of human evolution 
brings it out tenfold more clear than when it was 
proclaimed by lonely seers like Kant and Calvin 
and Augustine and Paul. Sin is the most univer- 
sal, the most stubborn, the most cruel, the most 
ineradicable element in human nature. 
n The correlate and corrective of sin is law. Law 
is the formulation of rights. Law is the declara- 
tion of the conditions of social well-being. As sin 
is the destruction of the interests of society and of 
other individuals, in order to secure the immediate 
gratification of the sinner at the social expense ; 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 93 

so law is the assertion that the social interests of 
the community must be conserved at the cost of 
reasonable and necessary sacrifice on the part 
of individuals. The law, therefore, "is holy, just, 
and good," because it is simply the affirmation of 
the common good as against the private encroach- 
ments of individuals. When once the law is de- 
clared, sin takes the form of disobedience. " Sin 
is lawlessness." "Sin is the transgression of the 
law." 

Law assumes two forms : the ceremonial and 
the moral. In early times these two are blended 
in one system. Later they are separated. At 
first both are supported by civil authority. Later 
the ceremonial is greatly reduced in scope ; and is 
compelled to rest on social sentiment and personal 
conscience for its sanction and support. And 
even the moral law, in its higher requirements and 
subtler applications, ultimately appeals to the 
same sources for its sanction. The moral law lays 
down the particular things which must be done, or 
must not be done, in the interest of the social 
order. The ceremonial law, on the contrary, 
confines itself to prescribing or prohibiting those 
things which promote or retard the cultivation of 
the social spirit in general; and reverence for God 
as the upholder of the social fabric. 



94 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

The ceremonial law is peculiarly liable to cor- 
ruption ; as the requirements of this law are 
artificial and arbitrary. They are valuable so long 
as they are recognized as symbolical of the atti- 
tude of reverence to God and service to man : 
but they are worse than worthless ; they are mis- 
chievous and perverse, as soon as this, their sym- 
bolical significance, is lost, and they are regarded 
as having virtue and value in themselves. / Every 
religious system in the process of time accumu- 
lates in its attic a heap of this worn-out ceremonial 
rubbish ; and a reformation is needed every few 
generations to sweep it out, and take a fresh start 
with new and vital symbols. Protestantism ac- 
cumulates this stock of faded millinery and worn- 
out garments as fast as Catholicism. The only 
difference is that Catholicism has been accumulat- 
ing longer ; and has a more intense aversion to 
the necessary periodical house-cleaning than the 
Protestant sects : and that Protestantism is prone 
to treasure up antiquated conceptions of truth 
rather than obsolete expressions of worship. 

Hence it often happens that the deeper and 
truer service of God and the social good demands 
the destruction and overthrow of the ceremonial 
requirements. Isaiah and Jesus, Luther and Knox, 
were compelled to tear down ceremonial observ- 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 95 

ances which had degenerated from original helps 
to actual obstructions to the religious spirit they 
were meant to foster and the social service they 
were intended to promote. 

As we have already seen, even the moral law, 
though to a much less extent, is subject to a 
corresponding degeneration. Acts which are per- 
missible and even praiseworthy in one stage of 
development are prohibited and condemned in an- 
other. As long as the worth of the human indi- 
vidual as such remained relatively unrecognized, 
slavery was relatively permissible ; and the wisest 
philosophers and the justest lawgivers of the an- 
cient world accepted slavery as a necessary human 
and therefore a warranted divine institution. But 
the advancing recognition of the dignity of human 
personality made the indignity of slavery increas- 
ingly manifest ; and thus what had been permitted 
as relatively right became prohibited as absolutely 
wrong. Where protection and support was as 
much as women could expect, and where the per- 
petuation of the family was as much as men 
thought of, polygamy and concubinage were not 
inconsistent elements of social arrangements, and 
not incompatible precepts of a genuinely benefi- 
cent law. But when the personal affections were 
deepened, and intellectual affinities began to be 



g6 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

appreciated, and spiritual union came to be de- 
sired, and the infinite worth of the human soul 
came to be recognized ; then what had been per- 
mitted to the hardness of primitive hearts was 
prohibited by the tenderer requirements of softened 
and civilized souls. Hence a Socrates and a Jesus 
may find their higher duty in opposition to the 
imperfect morality, as well as in disregard of the 
ceremonial observances of their times. 

And yet in so doing they do not destroy but 
rather fulfil the spirit of the law whose letter 
they abolish. For as the law has its sole justifi- 
cation in a form of social good which it upholds, 
so they are justified in overthrowing it, provided 
they can show a greater good, more adapted to the 
requirements of their times, which they establish 
in its place. 

Law is not ultimate ; but is the imperfect and 
temporary means to a permanent and ever-enlarg- 
ing social good. Below the law no man may fall 
without sin. Above it the prophet and reformer 
are often compelled to rise, in order to reach 
higher forms of good than the law has recognized ; 
and to lift the law, by their example and precept, 
to the level of the new and larger good. In the 
sight of the law such persons are sinners, equally 
with the criminals who break the law in their own 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 



97 



private interest. The difference, however, is world- 
wide. The culpable sinner hates the law and 
breaks it because it affirms the social and denies 
his private good. The prophet and reformer breaks 
down the letter of the ancient law because he finds 
it has become the excuse for selfish practices and 
private indulgences, and he desires to put in its 
place a law which will lift life to humaner levels, 
and bring man nearer to his God. 

Law originates in opposition to sin ; and in its 
early form is confined to the prohibition of irrev- 
erent and unsocial conduct. The Ten Command- 
ments are the nucleus of such a code. The form 
in which this code was delivered was doubtless 
much more natural than the literal interpreta- 
tion of the Old Testament narrative has led 
men to suppose. The date of the completion of 
this legislation was doubtless centuries later than 
tradition has assumed. The process of formation 
was doubtless far more gradual than orthodox com- 
mentators have been willing to admit. 

Yet if God be a Spirit ; if the moral progress 
of the race be an object of his thought and a pur- 
pose of his will ; then this legislation, by whom- 
soever it may have been promulgated, howsoever 
it may have been developed, whensoever it may 
have been completed, is nevertheless a genuine 

H 



98 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

revelation of the thought, an authoritative declara- 
tion of the will of God. For it proclaimed in no 
uncertain tone, and far in advance of the moral 
attainments of the age, the conditions essential 
to the maintenance of social well-being. What is 
social is spiritual. What is for the good of man 
is for the glory of God. The Mosaic law was social 
and beneficent. Therefore the Mosaic law is the 
revelation of the Spirit, the declaration of God. 

The contrast between sin and law brings judg- 
ment. Judgment is simply the declaration of the 
fact that sin and law are irreconcilable. There is 
nothing arbitrary or artificial about it. It is not a 
remote future event. It is a present reality. As 
soon as an act is performed, it is either lawful or 
unlawful ; it either promotes or injures the social 
good ; and judgment is the perception of that fact 
by God, by the man who has performed the act, 
and by all who come to know the act and see 
it in its true relations. The conscience of the 
individual and the verdict of society both are 
reflections and expressions, more or less perfect, 
of the absolute judgment of God, whose thought 
includes the act in all its bearings and relations. 

The judgment of sin brings condemnation. 
God's thought includes impartially the good of all 
his creatures. God is no respecter of persons. 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 99 

Sin, however, is the sacrifice of the good of others 
and of society to the fancied good of the individual 
sinner. Sin is in its very nature, selfish, mean, 
and contemptible. God's condemnation is his 
clear perception of how contemptible sin is. The 
reflection of that absolute judgment of God in 
the mind of the individual, or conscience, brings 
shame and humiliation and remorse. It is the 
conviction that we have done a mean and con- 
temptible thing. We may have enjoyed doing it 
when we thought merely of our own selfish inter- 
est ; our own private gratification. But when we 
come to see it in its larger relations ; when we 
come out of the darkness and illusion of our blind 
and petty selfishness ; when we see the wrong it 
has done to others ; when we see how hideous it 
looks in the daylight ; when we get found out, and 
see how others despise it ; when we look at it as 
it is in itself ; when we look at it in the impartial 
way in which God looks at it : then we are over- 
whelmed with guilt and shame. The only refuge 
of the sinner is concealment. Sin is ever sneak- 
ing and cowardly. It loves darkness rather than 
light, because its deeds are evil. He that doeth 
the truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may 
be manifest that they are wrought in God. 

An excellent test of character is this willingness 



100 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

to be tested by the light. Art thou willing to be 
known for just what thou art ? Wouldst thou 
welcome inspection in the inmost recesses of thy 
heart ? Wouldst thou enjoy the companionship 
of spirits who could see and read the secrets of 
thy soul ? Wouldst thou be comfortable if thy 
body were transparent glass, revealing in perfect 
clearness the thoughts and imaginations and 
desires of thy mind ? Then thou art guileless 
and guiltless. Then the omniscient Judge is not 
dreadful to thee, but welcome. Then thou art 
sinless and perfect. Then the spirit-world would 
be to thee a delightful home. 

With this test before us, it is hardly necessary 
to lay down in dogmatic form the doctrine that all 
men have sinned and come short of the glory of 
God. In the clear, white light of such a judgment 
all stand condemned ; all mouths are stopped. 

And yet to such a judgment-seat we must all be 
brought. Before it even now we all stand. The 
crude, coarse imagery of hell-fire and artificial tort- 
ure disturbs the minds of men no more. But the 
certainty that "there is nothing covered that shall 
not be revealed," this impending and indeed act- 
ually present judgment by revelation, is no creation 
of dogmatic theology; no fiction of the hortatory 
imagination ; no artificial projection of mediaeval 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL IOI 

horror. It is certain as thought, universal as 
reason, as old as creation ; and never set forth 
more clearly and forcibly than by Plato, at the 
close of the Gorgias. In these days, when the 
Christian teaching on this point is regarded by 
sentimentalists as harsh and irrational, it is well 
worth while to recall the words of this ancient 
philosopher, uttered four centuries before the 
Christian era. 

" Listen, then," Plato represents Socrates as 
saying, "to a very pretty tale, which I dare 
say that you may be disposed to regard as a 
fable only, but which, as I believe, is a true tale, 
for I mean, in what I am going to tell you, to 
speak the truth. Now in the days of Cronos 
there was this law respecting the destiny of man, 
which has always existed, and still continues in 
heaven, that he who has lived all his life in justice 
and holiness shall go, when he dies, to the islands 
of the blest, and dwell there in perfect happiness 
out of the reach of evil ; but that he who has lived 
unjustly and impiously shall go to the house of 
vengeance and punishment, which is called Tar- 
tarus. And in the time of Cronos, and even later 
in the reign of Zeus, the judgment was given on 
the very day on which the men were to die ; the 
judges were alive, and the men were alive ; and the 



102 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

consequence was that the judgments were not well 
given. Then Pluto and the authorities from the 
islands of the blest came to Zeus, and said that 
the souls found their way to the wrong places. 
Zeus said: 'I shall put a stop to this; the judg- 
ments are not well given, and the reason is that 
the judged have their clothes on, for they are 
alive ; and there are many having evil souls who 
are apparelled in fair bodies, or wrapt round in 
wealth and rank, and when the day of judgment 
arrives many witnesses come forward and witness 
on their behalf, that they have lived righteously. 
The judges are awed by them, and they them- 
selves, too, have their clothes on when judging; 
their eyes and ears and their whole bodies are 
interposed as a veil before their own souls. This 
all stands in their way ; there are the clothes of 
the judges and the clothes of the judged. What 
is to be done ? I will tell you : In the first place, 
I will deprive men of the foreknowledge of death, 
which they at present possess ; in the second 
place, they shall be entirely stripped before they 
are judged, for they shall be judged when they 
are dead ; and the judge too shall be naked, that 
is to say, dead ; he with his naked soul shall 
pierce into the other naked soul as soon as each 
man dies, he knows not when, and is deprived of 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL IO3 

his kindred, and has left his brave attire in the 
world above, and then the judgment will be just.' 

" This is a tale, Callicles, which I have heard 
and believe, and from which I draw the following 
inferences : Death, if I am right, is in the first 
place the separation from one another of two 
things, — soul and body ; this, and nothing else. 
And after they are separated they retain their 
several characteristics, which are much the same 
as in life ; the. body has the same nature and 
ways and affections, all clearly discernible ; for 
example, he who was a tall man while he was 
alive, will remain as he was, after he is dead ; and 
the fat man will remain fat ; and so on. And if 
he was marked with the whip and had the prints 
of the scourge in him when he was alive, you 
might see the same in the dead body. And, in a 
word, whatever was the habit of the body during 
life would be distinguishable after death, either 
perfectly, or in a great measure and for a time. 
And I should infer that this is equally true of 
the soul, Callicles ; when a man is stripped of the 
body, all the natural or acquired affections of the 
soul are laid open to view. And when they come 
to the judge, he places them near him and in- 
spects them quite impartially, not knowing whose 
the soul is : perhaps he may lay hands on the soul 



104 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

of the great king, or of some other king or poten- 
tate who has no soundness in him, but his soul is 
marked with the whip, and is full of the prints of 
the scars of perjuries, and of wrongs which have 
been plastered into him by each action, and he is 
all crooked with falsehood and imposture, and 
has no straightness because he has lived without 
truth. Him the judge beholds, full of deformity 
and disproportion, which is caused by license and 
luxury and insolence and incontinence, and de- 
spatches him ignominiously to his prison, and 
there he undergoes the punishment which he 
deserves. 

" Now I, Callicles, am persuaded of the truth of 
these things, and I consider how I shall present 
my soul whole and undefiled before the judge in 
that day. Renouncing the honours at which the 
world aims, I desire only to know the truth, and 
to live as well as I can, and, when the time comes, 
to die. Follow me then, and I will lead you 
where you will be happy in life and after death : 
and do you be of good cheer, for you will never 
come to any harm in the practise of virtue, if you 
are a really good and true man. The best way of 
life is to practice justice and every virtue in life 
and death." 

This same fact of an ever-present judgment 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 105 

Fichte brings out in a very searching passage 
in which he shows us how we may anticipate 
its verdict upon ourselves. " Tell me what direc- 
tion thy thoughts take, — not when thou with 
tightened hand constrainest them to a purpose, — 
but when in thy hours of recreation thou allow- 
est them freely to rove abroad ; tell me what 
direction they then take, where they naturally 
turn as to their most loved home, in what thou 
thyself in the innermost depths of thy soul find- 
est thy chief enjoyment, — and then I will tell 
thee what are thy tastes. Are they directed 
towards the Godlike, and to those things in nature 
and art wherein the Godlike most directly reveals 
itself in imposing majesty? — then is the God- 
like not dreadful to thee but friendly ; thy tastes 
lead thee to it, it is thy most loved enjoyment. 
Do they, when released from the constraint with 
which thou hast directed them to a serious pur- 
suit, eagerly turn to brood over sensual pleasures, 
and find relaxation in the pursuit of these ? — 
then hast thou a vulgar taste, and thou must 
invite animalism into the innermost recesses of 
thy soul before it can seem well with thee there." 
The profoundest test of character, however, is 
that given by our Lord, in the twenty-fifth chap- 
ter of Matthew. There the principle of separa- 



106 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

tion between the sheep and the goats is shown 
to be simply genuineness and fidelity in social 
service. "Then shall the King say unto them 
on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, 
inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the 
foundation of the world : for I was an hungered, 
and ye gave me meat : I was thirsty, and ye 
gave me drink : I was a stranger, and ye took 
me in ; naked, and ye clothed me : I was sick, 
and ye visited me : I was in prison and ye came 
unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, 
saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, 
and fed thee ? or athirst, and gave thee drink ? 
And when saw we thee a stranger and took thee 
in ? or naked, and clothed thee ? And when saw 
we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee ? 
And the King shall answer and say unto them, 
Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it 
unto one of these my brethren, even these least, 
ye did it unto me. Then shall he say also unto 
them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye 
cursed, into the eternal fire that is prepared for 
the devil and his angels : for I was an hungered, 
and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye 
gave me no drink : I was a stranger, and ye 
took me not in ; naked, and ye clothed me not ; 
sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 107 

shall they also answer, saying, Lord, when saw 
we thee an hungered, or athirst, or a stranger, 
or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not min- 
ister unto thee ? Then shall he answer them, 
saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye 
did it not unto one of these least, ye did it not 
unto me." 

A man's relations to his fellow-men deter- 
mine his relations to Christ and to God. For 
the will of God, the life and work of Christ, has 
for its end and aim the well-being of men, who 
are the children of God and the brethren of 
Christ. Hence our serviceableness to our fel- 
low-men is the exact and infallible measure of 
our acceptableness to God. No ritualistic, or 
ceremonial, or ecclesiastical, or doctrinal, or pro- 
fessional substitute can be found which will in 
the slightest degree take the place of this sim- 
ple, straightforward Tightness of relation with 
our fellow-men. Religion is the larger aspect, 
the universal form of our social relationships. 
For God is not a Being alien to men and re- 
mote from the world. God is the Father of all 
men ; the Spirit in whom we all live and move 
and have our being. And therefore our attitude 
toward God cannot be different from our atti- 
tude toward our fellow-men. Judgment, there- 



108 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

fore, is based on social considerations. This 
was the first principle of the teaching of Jesus. 
He makes social sincerity and social service 
everywhere the test of religious recognition and 
religious worth. " I say unto you that every 
one who is angry with his brother shall be in 
danger of the judgment; and whosoever shall 
say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of 
the council ; and whosoever shall say, Thou fool, 
shall be in danger of the hell of fire. If, there- 
fore, thou art offering thy gift at the altar, and 
tnere rememberest that thy brother hath aught 
against thee, leave there thy gift before the 
altar, and go thy way, first be reconciled to 
thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift." 
" For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your 
heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if 
ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will 
your Father forgive your trespasses." 

Life to-day is not so simple as was the life of 
those to whom these precepts were addressed. 
The administration of charity and justice, the 
conduct of business, the adjustment to our in- 
finitely complex economic and social conditions, 
render it frequently a very difficult matter to see 
just how this principle of fraternity and charity and 
mutual service should be applied. Even with the 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 109 

kindest and most generous intent, we are liable to 
go sadly astray. And we are so entangled in the 
meshes of social arrangements not of our own 
creating or our own choosing, that often what we 
would we cannot do, without purchasing a par- 
ticular good at the cost of much general harm. 
The principle, however, is as clear now as it was 
in Jesus' day. And according to that principle no 
man can be acceptable in the sight of God, no man 
is righteous in the nature of things, who know- 
ingly and willingly permits any man or woman, or 
any class of men and women, to suffer privatioa, 
or degradation, or oppression, or neglect, or injury, 
or insult, of which directly or indirectly he is the 
cause, or of which, directly or indirectly, without 
disregard of nearer duties, he might contribute to 
the cure. This socially serviceable disposition is 
the one spiritual quality which has absolute worth 
in the sight of God. He who has that has God. 
For that is what God is. God is love. By this 
principle husband and wife, father and mother, 
brother and sister, son and daughter, are judged 
in the home. By this principle the carpenter is 
judged at his bench ; the merchant at his counter ; 
the manufacturer in his factory ; the teacher in his 
school-room ; the lawyer in his office ; the physi- 
cian at the bedside ; the citizen upon the street ; 



HO SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

the statesman in the legislative hall ; the ruler on 
his throne. Just in so far as in and through 
these concrete relationships the world is better for 
our being in it, so far and no farther do we receive 
the divine approval. Just in so far as through our 
laziness, our wilful ignorance, our thoughtlessness, 
our unkindness, our inconsiderateness, our envy, 
our pride, our avarice, our lust, our cruelty, our 
timidity, our cowardice, our indifference, the bur- 
den of any fellow-man is more heavy; the sorrow 
of any human heart is more bitter ; the wrongs of 
any social class are more intolerable ; and the in- 
justice of any institution is more cruel for any 
word or deed that we have either said and done, or 
left unsaid and undone, to that extent we are 
guilty before God, and stand under his righteous 
condemnation. 

God's judgment consists in bringing a man face 
to face with his own character. It is not a remote 
event in the dim and distant future. It is a fact 
here and now. The decision turns upon a prin- 
ciple which we can understand perfectly clearly : 
and which we can apply, each to himself. So 
simple, so searching, so just, so inevitable, is the 
judgment of God. Into the final outcome of this 
judgment we will not here inquire. It is sufficient 
for the present that we see that it is a reality. 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 1 1 I 

Our next subject will be the way of salvation. 
And if judgment is the revealing of a man's real 
character, as determined by his social spirit, then 
the salvation which is to deliver him in this judg- 
ment day must be real and social too. No legal 
fictions, no logical contrivances, no theological 
schemes, will meet the case. The man who is 
to be judged righteous before that bar must be 
righteous. Is it then possible for man, sinful and 
guilty as he is by nature and by his own volition, 
to present before God a face that has no trace of 
shame ; a spirit from which every stain of guilt is 
really washed away ; a soul against which no fel- 
low-man can bring a valid charge ; a heart that 
has no slightest fear of being known by God and 
men precisely as it is ? Is salvation, like judg- 
ment, a fact so real, so definite, so reasonable, so 
conformable alike to the character of God and the 
nature of man, that we may be just as clear and 
sure of salvation as we are of judgment ? That 
will be the subject of the following chapter. 



CHAPTER V 

REPENTANCE AND FAITH SALVATION 

If sin and law and judgment were ultimate and 
final facts, man would be lost beyond all hope of 
redemption. If every act became part of an 
irrevocable character ; if we stood under a hard 
and fast system of rules and regulations ; if every 
violation was visited with its appropriate condem- 
nation ; if there were no possibility of change ; 
no way of escape; no room for mercy, then the 
outlook for the individual and for the race would 
be dark and foreboding. And yet sin and law and 
judgment are stubborn realities: they cannot be 
toned down, or smoothed over, or explained away. 
If there is any redemption or salvation or de- 
liverance, it must redeem and save and deliver us 
out of these very evils ; out of the grip of sin ; out 
of the clutches of violated law; out of the teeth 
of just condemnation ; out of the jaws of our own 
remorse and guilt. 

Fortunately, character, especially in its earlier 
stages, is not a fixture. We can change our mind. 

112 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 1 13 

We can repent. Appetite and passion may be too 
strong for us in the moment of temptation. We 
may yield, and do at their imperious dictation the 
wretched act, of which the moment after we are 
heartily ashamed. But this very fact of shame is 
the prophecy and witness of better possibilities. 
It is evidence that we are more than mere creat- 
ures of appetite and passion. If the act con- 
demned is our act, the act of condemnation is our 
own act also. And in this act of condemnation 
we take sides with God against the base act which 
we ourselves have done. 

We may go farther, and repudiate the act. We 
may say, " Although I did it, I will never do the 
like again. The base act, to be sure, is the ex- 
pression of what I was. It does not express what 
I now am, and what I am determined to become." 

When one sincerely repents, he is on the sure 
way to deliverance. He has already gone over to 
the side of the law ; and the only question that 
remains is whether he will be accepted. As Paul 
says, "But if what I would not, that I do, I con- 
sent unto the law that it is good. So, now, it is 
no more I that do it, but sin which dwelleth in 
me. For I delight in the law of God after the 
inward man : but I see a different law in my mem- 
bers, warring against the law of my mind, and 



I 14 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

bringing me into captivity under the law of sin 
which is in my members. So then I myself with 
the mind serve the law of God ; but with the 
flesh the law of sin." 

The law of God and the law of my mind in this 
case are at one, and both are arrayed against the 
law of sin which is in my members. Reason is no 
longer the slave of appetite, but has become, in 
purpose and endeavour at least, the free servant 
of God. 

Repentance, however, is only the first step 
toward salvation. It is not enough to repudiate 
the evil we have done. We must lay hold of the 
good we have not yet attained. And this appre- 
hension of an unrealized goodness, is faith. Man 
can no more keep evil out of his heart by repent- 
ance and resolution not to sin again, than he can 
drive the air out of a room with a fan and keep it 
out by shutting the door. Spirit, no less than 
nature, abhors a vacuum. The chamber that is 
merely empty, swept, and garnished, speedily 
becomes the abode of seven other spirits more evil 
than that which was first cast out. The mind 
must have something to think about. The will 
must have some motive. The heart must have 
some object of devotion. 

Faith is the recognition of the Father's right- ' 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL I I 5 

eous will as the ruling principle of conduct : it is 
the acceptance of Christ as the supreme object of 
affection and devotion : it is the reception of the 
Spirit as the inspirer and the guide of life. 

Faith, therefore, in the religious sense of the 
term, has primarily nothing to do with doctrinal 
creeds. Faith is a personal relation ; not an intel- 
lectual conviction. He who believes in the Father, 
the Son, and the Holy Spirit has all the faith 
that is needful for salvation. Out of this personal 
faith in God, there will indeed develop new hopes, 
new aspirations, new fellowships, new activities. 
And the grounds and principles of this divine life 
may very properly be precisely stated and logically 
formulated. Such statements and formulations of 
the laws and facts of the spiritual life are creeds. 
And these creeds, if they are faithful to the facts 
and true to experience, are valuable aids to the 
spiritual life. Yet we must be on our guard 
against putting the creed in the place of the 
person, and confounding intellectual assent to a 
series of propositions with spiritual faith in the 
living God. 

Belief, in the purely intellectual sense, is inde- 
pendent of our wills. Belief in this sense is the 
harmony of a given proposition with all the pre- 
viously accepted propositions which make up the 



Il6 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

contents of our minds. What a man believes in 
this sense depends on his early training, his 
inherited prejudices, his intellectual environment. 
The proposition which harmonizes with all the 
other propositions in his mind he must believe. 
He cannot help it. The law of intellectual gravi- 
tation compels him to believe it. The proposition 
which does not harmonize with the conclusions 
already established in his mind he cannot believe. 
Trying to believe it will do no good. Saying that 
he believes it will do much harm. It is simply 
impossible to believe it without intellectual sui- 
cide. And neither the wiles of Satan nor the 
grace of God can make it credible. 

People who were trained a generation ago and 
people who are trained in the critical methods of 
the library and the experimental methods of the 
laboratory to-day cannot think alike on historical 
and scientific questions. To endeavour to impose 
on the eager and earnest student of to-day the 
unscientific and uncritical formulations of preced- 
ing ages is an insult to reason : and he is war- 
ranted in slamming the doors of his intelligence 
at the first approach of the dogmatic inquisitor. 
Blind belief is little better than blind unbelief. 
Both are sure to err. 

That the world reveals one spiritual princi- 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 1 1 J 

pie ; that history contains one ideal character ; 
that human life is at least partially pervaded by 
altruistic motives ; these fundamental facts no 
candid citizen of a Christian community can 
consistently deny. And these three insights, 
rightly interpreted, give a Father in heaven to 
worship; a Son of God to follow; a Holy Spirit 
to revere in the hearts of others and welcome to 
our own. One who sees and welcomes so much 
as this is intellectually able to make confession of 
his faith in the only formula the New Testament 
prescribes. Other truths are, indeed, desirable for 
instruction and edification. But to make more 
than this an intellectual test of spiritual fitness 
for acceptance with God and fellowship with the 
Christian community is an unwarranted imperti- 
nence. It proceeds on the assumption that belief 
in something more than Father, Son, and Holy 
Spirit is essential to salvation. Such zeal for the 
amplification of intellectual belief is an unwitting 
confession of lack of vital faith in God. 

Neither is faith to be confounded with feeling ; 
or measured by the amount of emotion that accom- 
panies it. Some feeling, of course, there must be 
in connection with Christian faith. We cannot 
see the difference between right and wrong, be- 
tween the purity and kindness and generosity and 



Il8 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

love of Christ, and the uncleanness and brutality 
and cruelty and hatefulness of sin, and remain 
utterly unmoved. We cannot stand in the midst 
of the mighty, world-historic conflict, where on the 
one side multitudes of men and women are being 
betrayed and maltreated and plundered by the 
sin of others, and degraded and polluted by sin in 
their own hearts ; and on the other side thousands 
and tens of thousands of the best and noblest men 
and women the world has produced are banded to- 
gether in the name of Christ in the endeavour, first, 
to banish sin from their own hearts and lives and 
then to banish it from the hearts and lives of 
others, and so remove it from the world ; — we 
cannot stand emotionless between these contend- 
ing hosts. We cannot fail to feel some drawing 
out of our hearts toward Christ. Deep in the 
real nature of every rational being there is a 
sound core of loyalty to what is right and true. 
This profound response and unswerving alle- 
giance to what is just and true and kind and good, 
and to Christ as the supreme embodiment and 
historic champion of truth and goodness in the 
world, is all the emotional accompaniment that 
is essential to the reality of faith. This deep re- 
sponse of the whole nature may not make so 
good a showing on examination ; but the most 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL I 19 

silent and imperceptible turning of the depths 
of our moral nature toward duty, and toward 
God as the author of duty and the defender of 
the right, is worth more than whole tempests of 
froth and foam on the heaving surface of emo- 
tional excitement. 

The great question, after all, is not, Have I a 
love for Christ of which I can be conscious all 
the time ? That way lies discouragement, de- 
spondency, despair. Faith must lead the way to 
love. And the question of faith is, rather, Have 
I Christ ? Whether with little emotion or with 
much, am I resolved that what work I do shall 
be done in his name ; what influence I have shall 
be cast on his side ; however cold and dead my 
emotions may become, however weak and blunder- 
ing my efforts may prove, such as I am, I will be 
his ? If we are thus resolved to serve him, we 
already believe in him ; and we shall come to love 
him in due time. 

Faith again is not to be confounded with works, 
nor measured by them ; though works are the 
ultimate and inevitable fruit of faith. Faith lays 
hold on the ideal ; and our works come far 
short of that. Faith is the deeper principle. 
Ideals are more significant than facts. The 
idealism of the heart rather than the ritualism 



120 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

of the hands is the true expression of the real 
self. 

So here again the great question is not, What 
have I done ? but, What am I trying to do ? Three 
men are on a mountain-side. The first is only a 
few steps from the base : the second is half-way 
up : the third is within a few steps of the summit. 
Which of these men is nearest the summit? "The 
third, of course," says every superficial observer, 
judging by works alone. Let us look deeper at 
the minds and hearts of these three men. The first 
has his face set resolutely toward the summit, 
and is determined to press forward until it shall 
be reached. The second man is undecided, look- 
ing sometimes up and sometimes down. The 
third has seen enough already and is thinking of 
descent. Once more, which of these three men 
is nearest the summit ? The third is farthest 
from it of them all. Whether the second will 
ever reach it you cannot say. The first man is 
nearest of them all, for his mind and will are on 
the heights already and in due time will bring 
his body there. 

Thus faith is mightier than works. The ideal 
is more potent than the real. Aspiration is more 
significant than achievement. As repentance is 
the repudiation of the actual bad, so faith is the 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL I 2 1 

identification with the ideal good. Faith is, first, 
the acceptance of the ideal presented from with- 
out in Christ ; but it is at the same time the 
promise and potency that the ideal shall be real- 
ized and the image of Christ reproduced within 
ourselves. As repentance cancels the past, so far 
as we can do it ; so faith affirms the future, so far 
as that lies in our power : and both alike appeal 
to God to ratify our repentance by forgiveness 
and to confirm our faith by its acceptance. 

This appeal of man to God is prayer. Does 
God listen to our appeal ? Does God answer 
prayer ? 

Here we are at once confronted by the objec- 
tion of popular science. We are told that all 
things are governed by uniform and necessary 
laws. There are no lawless forces in the world. 
In the heavens above, in the earth beneath, in the 
waters under the earth, the scientist sees law. 
Law has governed the evolution of plant, animal, 
and man. Laws of ethics, economics, trade, art, 
are unfolding themselves before our eyes. We 
all know that our plumbing must conform to the 
laws of sanitation ; our carpentering to the laws of 
geometry ; our bridges to the laws of physics ; our 
navigation to the laws of trigonometry ; our con- 
duct to the laws of ethics ; our business to the 



122 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

laws of trade. And we are not so simple as to 
suppose that by rash petitions for special interfer- 
ence with these laws of nature we can avert the 
consequences of disregarding them. We carry no 
check-book on the bank of omnipotence which 
enables us to get just what we ask for by simply 
making out the checks and presenting them in 
proper form. There is no room for partiality and 
favouritism within this universe of law. Therefore, 
says the scientist, there is no place for prayer. 

Law, indeed, is uniform. No sane man dreams 
of changing it. Yet our wishes, expressed to our 
fellow-men, accomplish results. It is a law that 
certain bacilli, preying upon certain tissues in cer- 
tain conditions, cause death. When, in these 
conditions, I call in a physician I do not ask him 
to change that law in my behalf. I ask him to 
<"^bring to bear other laws. I ask him to introduce 
into the problem the action of certain chemicals 
upon the infected tissues. The introduction of 
these new forces changes the conditions, and the 
result of the changed conditions is my recovery to 
health. No law has been abrogated or broken. 
The physician brought not less law, but more. 
This is the sphere in which will operates. It is 
not in the power of God or man to turn a bullet 
from its path, or a flash of lightning from its 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 



123 



course, or a bacillus from its prey, by contradict- 
ing the laws which govern the action of these 
forces, any more than it is in the power of either 
God or man to make two mountains with no inter- 
vening valley. It certainly is in the power of man 
to determine to some extent whether the action of 
the bullet, the lightning, or the bacillus shall be 
so combined with other forces as to bring life or 
death to man. And what is possible with man is 
not of necessity impossible with God. The scien- 
tific objections to the utility of prayer do not 
touch the real point, which is not whether special 
sequences are invariable or not, but whether the 
coordination of these special sequences is under 
the control of rational will or of blind chance. 

That there is room in the world for the effective 
action of human intelligence without interference 
with any law whatever, is a fact established by 
every act of forethought which man performs. 
That God can answer prayer, if there be a God, is 
as little doubtful as that my neighbour can grant a 
favour if he hears my request. To deny the possi- 
bility of answer to prayer is equivalent to denying 
freedom to man and denying personality to God. 
Between freedom and fate, between a personal 
God and blind chance, between faith in prayer and 
trust to luck, we must choose. It is only the 



124 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

short-sighted and superficial mind that can find a 
resting-place between these two opinions. That 
the Father gives the Holy Spirit to them that ask 
him involves no greater psychological difficulty, 
and encounters no stronger scientific objection, 
than that human parents give good gifts to their 
children. 

The new psychology is teaching us that the one 
stronghold of freedom is the power of self-directed 
attention. Attention determines motive, motive 
determines act, and acts seal our doom. Whether 
we give more or less attention to an object deter- 
mines the part that object shall play in our 
character and life. Now, in general terms, the 
well-being or the misery of our lives, in theo- 
logical terms our salvation or our damnation, 
depends upon whether those laws of life which 
are the conditions of well-being are observed or 
disobeyed. In the more obvious and superficial 
sense salvation is by works. The deeper question, 
however, is, What determines a man's works ? 
What makes him obey or disobey these laws ? 
Here is the test. One man relies exclusively on 
his past experience, his acquired training, his 
established habits, to guide him when particular 
cases of conduct arise. Another man habitually 
recognizes the presence of the Infinite Spirit who 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 1 2 5 

rules the world by righteous laws ; habitually 
gives thanks for the beneficent fruits of this 

/ divine working in the world, and as habitually 
surrenders his own will to become the instrument 
of the divine will in so far as that can find expres- 
sion in his individual conduct. Is it not clear 
that the second man will have the continuous con- 
scious presence of the Infinite Spirit with him to 
a greater degree than the first man ? Is it not 
clear that the second man will be found reverently 
conforming his life to the divine laws in those 
sudden emergencies which come to us all ; while 
the first man will more frequently be caught nap- 
ping and will react from passion and caprice, 
rather than from obedience and reverence for the 
divine law ? 

The laws of individual well-being are divine. 
But the laws of social well-being are, if we may 
so express it, more divine. That is, they take 
precedence of the others when the two conflict. 
The cholera germ, the tiger, the savage, fulfil 
the laws of their individual being. Civilized 
man is called upon to do more. Not the laws 
of his individual well-being alone, but the laws of 
social well-being as well are entrusted to his care 
and keeping. Profoundly apprehended, these two 

J laws are doubtless one. Yet this profound 



126 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

apprehension of the identity of individual and 
social interest is just what is hard to secure 
and maintain at the moment of action. To the 
natural man these laws seem of very unequal 
urgency. God's will includes them both. And 
the man whose will is constantly and habitually 
offered in prayerful surrender to the will of God 
cannot fail to acquire a settled disposition to give 
due weight to social obligations as against private 
interests, which would be lacking to the same man 
were he withdrawn from this spiritual fellowship 
with God. The general disposition will find expres- 
sion in particular acts ; and the answer to his habitual 
prayers will come in the fruitfulness of righteous 
deeds and holy influences which could have gone 
forth only from a mind and heart constantly united 
by prayer to the thought and will of God. 

In things so subtle as the relations of motive 
to act, of character to conduct, it will be as impos- 
sible to trace precise sequences of cause and effect 
in the majority of cases as it is to find the particu- 
lar rays of sunshine and drops of rain and atoms 
of fertilizer again in the particular kernels of the 
ripened grain. The farmer who should boast of 
his ability to trace such connection would be set 
down for a fraud, and the man who should expect 
him to do it would be regarded as a fool. 



ANTH ROPOLOGICAL 1 2 7 

Nor is the answer to prayer due simply to the 
reflex action of his own effort upon the man who 
prays. The God of Christian faith ; the God 
revealed in Jesus Christ, and manifested in the 
continued presence of the Holy Spirit, is not a 
purely transcendent being, outside of the world 
and remote from men, like the gods of Epicurus, 
who "repose on blissful seats, which never winds 
assail nor rain-clouds sprinkle with their showers, 
nor snow falling white with hoary frost doth 
buffet, but cloudless ether ever wraps them round, 
beaming in broad diffusion of glorious light. For 
nature supplies their every want, nor aught im- 
pairs their peace of soul." The immanent God, 
revealed in history, and present in human society 
to-day, is by his very nature " a prayer-hearing 
and a prayer-answering God." Prayer is not a 
mere petition projected into empty space. Prayer 
is communion. It is fellowship. Prayer lays hold 
on God ; apprehends afresh the mind of Christ ; 
opens the heart to receive the Holy Spirit. The 
attempt to cheat God by using him as a means to 
the gratification of our private whims and ca- 
prices is doubtless futile. God is not mocked. 
Eliminate from prayer all its spiritual signifi- 
cance and reality ; reduce it to a mere device 
for getting what one happens to want by simply 



128 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

going through a verbal form : and then it is easy 
enough, without much show of scientific learn- 
ing or any invocation of the aid of natural law, to 
demonstrate that such prayer is futile and absurd. 
That prayer can be seriously discussed on this 
low plane ; that men of sense can impute to other 
men of sense such crude and childish notions of 
spiritual things, reveals the sad pass to which 
deistic traditions have brought the religious think- 
ing of our times. 

Prayer which makes immediate, particular, mate- 
rial things the end, and God simply the means of 
getting them, fails as it deserves to. It does not 
come into communion with God. It is not prayer. 
And it is not answered because it is not prayer. 

Once recognize that prayer is the communion 
of man with a living God, revealed in Christ and 
present in the world as the Spirit inspiring every 
worthy form of social life, and then it becomes 
perfectly evident that every prayer must bring its 
appropriate and objective and positive and helpful 
answer. When I read a book, and get information 
from it, I do not attribute that information to the 
reflex influence upon myself of the effort which I 
put forth in the act of reading. In reading I put 
myself into communication with the mind of the 
author. When I talk with a friend, and am made 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 129 

better by it, I do not credit my improved condition 
to the reflex influence of my own effort at conver- 
sation. Prayer is communion with the thought 
and will of God. And the answer to prayer is 
from him ; not from ourselves. The man who 
communes with God will grow to be like him. 
The man who takes his perplexities and problems 
and temptations to God in prayer will receive 
from God light and help and strength, which he 
could receive from no other source. 

Answer to prayer belongs not to the realm of 
magic and miracle ; but lies clearly within the 
sphere of causality and law. Prayer lifts the 
desires of the individual up into their larger rela- 
tions to the will of God : and it brings them back, 
purified by contact with his holy and higher pur- 
pose, and strengthened and confirmed by his appro- 
val and sympathy. 

When Peter and Zacchaeus and Nicodemus 
came to Jesus when he was on earth, confessed to 
him their sins and shortcomings, their perplexities 
and doubts, they went away from the interview 
wiser and better men. Christ is not dead. His 
Spirit is not withdrawn from the world. In the 
Holy Scriptures, in Christian institutions, in the 
hearts and lives of his followers, in the teaching 
of the church and the training given by Christian 

K 



n/ 



130 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

parents to their children, Christ is a living pres- 
ence, a positive force in the world to-day. Prayer 
is the communion of the spirit of man with this 
ever-present Spirit of Christ ; and is as real and 
objective a communion, and brings as real and 
definite an answer, as did the communion of the 
early disciples with their Master when he was 
present with them in the flesh. 

The current misconceptions of prayer are chiefly 
due to an excessive emphasis upon mere specific 
petition, and a corresponding neglect of the ele- 
ments of thanksgiving, praise, fellowship, and 
communion. Petition for specific and definite 
material benefits occupies as subordinate a place 
in true spiritual prayer, as the prediction of pre- 
cise future events occupied in Hebrew prophecy. 
Intimate and intense appreciation of the spiritual 
purposes of God did incidentally enable these 
ancient seers to forecast the trend of national 
affairs and the tendency of historical development. 
And in like manner loving surrender to the will of 
God and the mind of Christ not infrequently 
carries material as well as spiritual blessings in 
its train. If we seek first the kingdom of God 
and his righteousness, many other things will be 
added unto us. But if we seek these other things 
first, we miss the kingdom and the righteousness, 



'/ 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL I 3 I 

and with the loss of these we lose also the mate- 
rial blessings which these carry in their train. 

Prayer is as welcome to God as it is indispen- 
sable to man. For God does not work without 
means. He does not thrust reforms upon the 
world before the world is ready to receive them. 
The desires and petitions of individual hearts and 
united congregations are the signs by which the 
Spirit recognizes the fulness of time for a spirit- 
ual and social advance. 

Prayer, of course, is not a substitute for effort. 
Indeed the chief form in which answer to prayer 
is manifest is increased effort on the part of our- 
selves and others ; and renewed courage and con- 
fidence in the utility of effort./ Prayer is always 
possible. Work is not. God is always near ; 
though others be far away. Work meets delays 
obstacles, discouragements. Prayer moves in the ]/ 
sphere of pure, unobstructed will. Hence, while 
all other forms of expression are outwardly con- 
ditioned, intermittent, fitful ; prayer is steady, 
patient, persistent, and never despairs. 

Prayer is the appointed means by which the will ! 
of the individual becomes emancipated from its 
finitude and isolation, and becomes consciously 
united to the large and noble purposes of God. 
( It is spiritually the most elevating, intellectually 



132 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

the most broadening, socially the most expanding, 
morally the most quickening, practically the most 
profitable exercise in which man can engage. 
And when once we have emancipated ourselves 
from the deistic notion of a far-away God ; when 
once we have learned to think of him as real 
with at least as much reality as the wills of men 
and the forces of society, we shall recognize that 
answer to prayer, provided that it really is prayer* 
is just as certain and inevitable as that an ade- 
quate cause must produce its appropriate effect. 

God rules the world by law ; and those laws are 
inexorable. The physical consequences of sin — 
the disease, the poverty, the pain — follow as inva- 
riably as fire burns and water flows. The social 
consequences also the sinner cannot escape. The 
man who has lied will be despised ; the man who 
has stolen will be distrusted ; the man who has 
been cruel will be hated ; regardless of his subse- 
quent repentance. The world, except it be trans- 
formed by the Spirit of Christ, is as hard and 
merciless and relentless to the sinner as is nature 
herself. 

In early times men naturally interpreted God 
in terms of their own moral ideals. And their 
gods were cruel, arbitrary, and unforgiving beings. 
It is a late stage of human development which 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 1 3 3 

begins to question, " Tantcene animis coelestibus 
irces 

Even Christianity has found it hard to believe 
the full gospel of its Master on this point. And it 
has borrowed its conceptions of the divine govern- 
^ ment more from the civil governments of the an- 
cient world than from the parables and precepts 
and actions of its Lord. As long as the Greek or 
Roman could trace even-handed justice in archon 
or emperor, they had such reason to be thankful 
that to have asked for more would have seemed an 
impertinence. And consequently they thought 
of God as a world-governor, and ascribed to him 
justice as his highest attribute. For justice in 
matters political and social was the highest ideal 
of the ancient world. 

But since the revolutions in America and France, 
the rise of constitutional liberty in England, and 
the spread of democratic doctrine everywhere, men 
have come more and more to recognize that right 
derives its content and meaning from the good 
which lies beyond it as its end and aim ; justice 
is compelled to justify itself by the proof of its 
beneficence ; and the right of human kings and 
lords is respected only in so far as it promotes 
the well-being of their subjects and dependents. 
What wonder, then, that this same tendency and 



134 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

spirit, applied to theology, appeals from the justice 
to the love of God, and calls him no longer Gov- 
ernor but Father, as Jesus taught men to do. 

The conception of the Father to which we were 
led in our first chapter, as the absolute thought 
which holds all things and all men in their true 
relations, shows that he must condemn sin ; for 
sin is the flat contradiction of that truth which the 
divine thought perceives and of that order which 
the divine will affirms. To condemn a sinner, 
because of his sin, to more misery than the direct 
consequences of his sin involve ; to keep him in 
condemnation and punishment after he had re- 
pented of his sin, and was trying to overcome it, 
would be the act not of a Father but of a brute ; 
not of a God but of a devil. It would be an act, 
not of truth and light and love, but of falsehood 
and darkness and malignity. A being capable of 
that could not command even the respect of the 
average man to-day ; much less obtain the worship 
of the holiest and best. This belief in the mercy 
and forgiveness and grace of God is not a piece 
of sentimentalism, which argues that because we 
would like to be forgiven, therefore God must do 
it. It is a transparent truth of reason ; which 
affirms that the confounding of the man and his 
act, in spite of repentance and aspiration and en- 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 135 

deavour to do better, would be an act of blindness 
unworthy of short-sighted man, and therefore im- 
possible to the omniscient God. It is grounded 
not on what we would like to have done to us ; but 
on what we ourselves would be willing to do to an- 
other. We believe in the mercy of God, because 
we cannot worship in God what we despise in men ; 
because we cannot exclude from our thought of 
him what is best and noblest in ourselves. 

The grace of God is so transparent and self- 
evident a principle to-day that the marvel is that 
any one can doubt it. It is only the savage, and 
the civilized man who has drawn his conceptions 
of God from a semi-barbarous antiquity, who 
denies it, 

Yet we owe this revelation of the grace of God 
to noble men like the authors of the second por- 
tion of Isaiah and of the book of Jonah, who first 
proclaimed it to the hard hearts of unbelieving- 
men. We owe it, above all, to Jesus Christ, who 
revealed it in the compassion and pity and for- 
giveness with which he met all forms of penitence 
and faith ; who taught it in the matchless para- 
bles of the unmerciful servant and the prodigal 
son, in the precept " Until seventy times seven," 
and in the petition, " Forgive us our trespasses 
as we forgive those that trespass against us"; 



136 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

who sealed it by the prayer upon the cross, 
" Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
they do." This revelation of forgiveness and 
grace is the central and crowning message of 
Christianity. " For the law was given by Moses ; 
grace and truth came by Jesus Christ." 

God cannot change. As Christ revealed him, 
so eternally he is. The time can never come 
when God will refuse forgiveness to a repentant 
soul. That souls may sink so low and become 
so dead as to find no place for repentance is, 
indeed, possible and probable. But that God 
should sink so low as to find no place in his 
heart for forgiveness, — this is simply inconceiv- 
able. God cherishes to the last his gracious 
purpose of redemption ; and stands ready to 
welcome with open arms and robe and ring 
every returning prodigal, who in any far-off 
time or place shall find himself morally and spirit- 
ually able to leave his sin and shame behind him, 
and come back to his Father and his home. 

In all grace and forgiveness there is a wondrous 
mingling of suffering and joy. There is more 
trouble and labour involved in seeking and finding 
the one lost sheep than in guarding the ninety 
and nine that went not astray. And yet there 
is more joy over the recovery of the one, than 



ANTH ROPOLOGICAL 1 3 7 

over the security of all the rest. The life of 
Christ, as the supreme manifestation of the grace 
of God, was of necessity a life pre-eminent in 
suffering and sorrow. For in sympathy and pity 
and helpfulness and love he took upon himself 
the infirmities and sorrows, the guilt and sin of 
the men to whom he ministered and of the world 
he came to save. Had he been less faithful to 
the truth, less eager to reveal God's saving grace 
to men ; he might have lived an untroubled life 
in the midst of a select circle of admiring dis- 
ciples. But it was the sick not the whole whom 
he sought to heal ; the sinner and not the right- 
eous whom he came to save. And in loyalty to 
this divine mission of grace, in fidelity to this 
human service of sympathy and love, he exposed 
himself to the envy and jealousy and avarice and 
hypocrisy and malignity and hate of which the 
world was full and underneath which humanity lay 
crushed and bruised and bleeding. " Surely he 
hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. 
He was wounded for our transgressions, he was 
bruised for our iniquities : the chastisement of 
our peace was upon him ; and with his stripes we 
are healed." 

All this he bore, not to offer a ransom to the 
devil, nor, what is the modern equivalent of that 



138 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

ancient theory, to appease an angry God. All 
this he suffered, not to vindicate the majesty of 
the divine law, or to uphold the dignity of the 
divine government. For neither the law nor the 
government of God are so feeble and so in need of 
external props as these theories assume. All this 
he endured simply because it is in the nature of 
love to identify itself with its object. To love a 
good man is to rejoice in and share all the glory 
and the gladness that his goodness sheds about him. 
To love a bad man is to suffer with and to share all 
the shame and pain his badness brings upon him. 
God loves bad men. Christ came to bring God's 
love to a wicked world. And that is why he was 
compelled to live a life of suffering and die an 
ignominious death. 

Thanks to the love of the Father, thanks to the 
grace of Christ, every man who in sincerity repents 
of his sins and looks to God for help to live the 
righteous life is sure of immediate acceptance and 
complete forgiveness. He will still suffer much 
from the avenging laws of a violated nature ; for 
a long time he will suffer more from the suspicion 
and hatred of hard human hearts; but from the 
moment he truly repents and gives his heart to 
God for forgiveness and guidance and control, he 
■ is admitted with the full privileges of sonship into 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 1 39 

the household of faith and the family of God. 
From that moment he is a child of the Father, a 
friend of Christ, and a candidate for the life of 
the Spirit. 

By grace, through faith, based on repentance, 
we receive the assurance of salvation. We do 
not save ourselves. There is in man the capacity 
for the divine life, an ability to respond to the 
divine ideal when once that is presented. But 
unless this ideal comes home to man, rousing and 
quickening this capacity into life, the soul remains 
dormant awhile, and then succumbs to decay and 
death like an unplanted, unsunned, unwatered 
seed. The presentation of the divine ideal there- 
fore is the efficient cause of man's salvation. 
God's effectual calling precedes man's successful 
choosing. It is by the winsomeness and attrac- 
tiveness of the divine ideal, presented to our wills 
and accepted by them, that we are saved. How, 
then, is the presentation of this divine ideal made 
to man ? The depth and breadth of any system 
of theology may be tested by its answer to that 
question. 

The divine ideal of human life, the Logos, the 
Holy Spirit, has never been without witness in 
the world, and is not far from any one of us. 
Every natural object is the creation and expression 



140 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

of the Eternal Reason ; every righteous law and 
beneficent institution of society is the embodiment 
of the Divine Spirit ; and every fellow-man is in 
his inherent capacity and dignity the image of 
God. 

The call of God, the presentation of the divine 
ideal of human life, consequently may come 
through any or all of these its manifold embodi- 
ments. It is not a ghost-like apparition, robed in 
a shroud of mystery, entering unannounced some 
secret presence-chamber of the soul, when all the 
doors of sense are closed, and all the avenues 
of reason are barred by superstitious fear and 
bolted by blind credulity. 

The call of God is the outward, visible, tangible 
appeal of the divine goodness and glory and love 
and truth, as it comes home to man's heart 
through the love of father and mother, the noble- 
ness of brothers, the tenderness of sisters, the 
sweet charities of family and home, the purity 
and gentleness of woman, the honour and bravery 
of man, the call of country, the majesty of law, 
the grandeur of mountain and sea, the glory of 
sunlit clouds and starry skies, the solemn rites of 
temple service, the spoken word of pious exhorta- 
tion, the attitude of silent prayer, the written 
Book of special revelation, — the old, old story of 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 141 

the words and deeds, the life and death of him 
who was at once Son of man and Son of God. 

In these voices of nature and humanity, whereby 
we are called away from the selfish, sensual, sinful 
life, God is present in different degrees of fulness 
and completeness. Response to any one of these 
calls is a step toward salvation. And the degree 
and fulness of the salvation thereby attained is 
proportioned to the degree and fulness of that rev- 
elation of the divine to which the response is 
given. The love of father, mother, wife, and child, 
the love of nature and of native land, devotion to 
science or to art, are of divine origin, and have 
divine potency to lift man out of that exclusive 
selfishness which is the soul of sin. 

Yet they reach and redeem only parts of the 
man. They do not take the whole man on all 
sides and in all relations, up into that blessed life 
of love which is salvation. The salvation wrought 
by these agencies, though real as far as it goes, 
is incomplete. The man who feels the noble 
stirrings of human affection in his breast is not 
wholly dead in trespasses and sins. Nor have we 
therein the guarantee that he has entered wholly 
into life. Life and death may be striving together 
in him, and the issue may still be doubtful. Re- 
sponse to one of these divine voices does not in- 



142 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

sure a like response to all the rest. It is at most 
a ground of hope. And yet, how often is that 
hope betrayed ! Have we not seen men so alive 
to natural beauty that they could seize and make 
immortal the fading glory of a sunset, who were 
yet so far dead to the diviner beauty of the human 
heart that they could betray to lasting wretched- 
ness and shame a woman's trusting love ? Have 
we not seen a devotion to wife and children truly 
divine, existing in the same breast with fiendish 
treachery toward business associates and heartless 
betrayal of creditors ? Have we not seen patriot- 
ism and pollution, zeal for a great cause and con- 
tempt for humble men, the love of truth and the 
hate of duty, stamped on the same features, ani- 
mating the same heart, and struggling for control 
of the same life ? 

Just so far as one is faithful to these human 
loves and duties, his soul will be ripened and ex- 
panded by them into fuller love and larger life, 
and receptiveness for more of God. In so far as 
he is false, and betrays any of these human claims, 
to that extent the forces of death are gaining over 
the powers of life within him. 

That man alone who, not by the hearing of the 
ear nor by the speaking of the lips merely, but by 
the assent of his heart and the devotion of his will, 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 1 43 

has made Jesus Christ his personal ideal ; who has 
made Christ's law of love his principle of life ; who 
day by day strives to follow him, and asks and 
receives forgiveness for all wherein he falls short 
of that divine ideal ; — that man alone is sure of 
salvation here and now, always and everywhere. 

Not that his life is lifted all at once to the level 
of his ideal. As we shall see in the next chapter, 
the divine life is a slow and gradual growth. " We 
are saved by hope." And yet the intelligent and 
whole-souled acceptance of Christ and his grace, 
by faith and love, is the promise and potency of a 
complete and perfect triumph over every form of 
selfishness and sin, and an abundant entrance into 
eternal life. For sincere devotion to him means 
that his ideal becomes our ideal ; his life our life. 
And since his ideal and life is nothing less than 
the comprehensive will of God and the complete 
devotion to the service of man, it follows that 
every true disciple of Christ is in principle and at 
heart faithful to every duty, loyal to every rela- 
tionship, devoted to every cause, friendly to every 
person, the supporter of every institution in and 
through which the divine goodness is made mani- 
fest to men; and will continue faithful to whatever 
new forms of goodness and love the future may 
unfold. 



144 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

The raw material of appetite and passion, the 
primitive instincts of self-preservation and self- 
assertion, are not all at once worked over into 
spiritual gifts and Christian graces. Repentance, 
faith, and grace bring God and man into right 
^relations ; and thereby give complete assurance of 
ultimate salvation. The actual working out of 
this union is the function of the Spirit, and will 
form the subject of the following chapter. 

The thought of God as an arbitrary, external 
Ruler created artificial difficulties in the way of 
the divine forgiveness which required equally arbi- 
trary and artificial schemes for their reconciliation. 
When once we grasp the thought of God as the 
Universal Will whose aim is the well-being of all 
his children and the development of the perfect 
social order, then instantly we see that the free 
grace of God, and the full forgiveness of every 
repentant and contrite heart, is not an afterthought 
and a contrivance of the divine ingenuity, but is 
a necessary outcome of the divine nature. It is 
impossible for God not to forgive a sinner the 
instant he repents ; for not to forgive is not to 
love, and that is impossible with God. An unfor- 
giving spirit is the one unforgivable sin in man ; 
and surely we cannot attribute that to God. God, 
indeed, hates sin with bitter, uncompromising hate ; 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 145 



but that is because sin is injurious to the men 
whom God loves, and is inconsistent with that 
social ideal of mutual helpfulness and good-will 
which he is seeking to develop among men. But 
the moment a man renounces his sin, he at once 
becomes acceptable to God ; both for what he is 
in himself, and for the social service he is now 
for the first time prepared to render. As Pro- 
fessor Royce has expressed it, " The One Will must 
conquer. The one aim is stern to its steadfast 
enemies, but it is infinitely regardful of all the 
single aims, however they may seem wayward, that 
can at last find themselves subdued and yet real- 
ized in its presence, and so conformed to its will. 
All these rivulets of purpose, however tiny, all 
these strong floods of passion, however angry, it 
desires to gather into the surging tides of its in- 
finite ocean, that nothing may be lost that con- 
sents to enter. The One Will is no one-sided will. 
It desires the realization of all possible life, how- 
ever rich, strong, ardent, courageous, manifold such 
life may be, if only this life can enter into that 
highest unity. All that has will is sacred to it, 
save in so far as any will refuses to join with the 
others in the song and shout of the Sons of God. 
Its warfare is never intolerance, its demand for 
submission is never tyranny, its sense of the excel- 



146 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

lence of its own unity is never arrogance ; for its 
warfare is aimed at the intolerance of the separate 
selves, its yoke is the yoke of complete organic 
freedom, its pride is the perfect development of 
all life. When we serve it, we must sternly cut 
off all that life in ourselves or in others that can- 
not ultimately conform to the universal will ; but 
we have nothing but love for every form of sentient 
existence that can in any measure express this 
Will." 

From the social point of view sin is deadly : be- 
cause it is selfish and anti-social. Law is stern 
and remorseless : because it is the indispensable 
condition of social well-being. Judgment is search- 
ing and severe : because every trace of selfishness 
and insincerity must be sifted and burned out of 
human hearts before the perfect society can come. 
And on the other hand, from this same social 
point of view, the true penitent is absolutely sure 
of immediate acceptance with the Father : because 
his penitence is the renunciation of his anti-social 
attitude. His feeble faith and faint aspiration is 
at once clothed in the garments of that perfect 
social righteousness which he now accepts as the 
ideal of character and the aim of conduct. His 
eleventh-hour service is equally rewarded with the 
longer labour of those who have borne the heat 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 147 

and burden of the day : because the spirit of ser- 
vice and not the length of labour or the quantity 
of work is the essential test of fitness for the new 
life on which he enters, and the divine society of 
which he becomes a member. The grace of God 
is as full and free as his judgment is searching and 
severe. The salvation of the man who repents is 
as sure and certain as is the condemnation of the 
man who persists in selfishness and sin. The rea- 
son why men are called on everywhere to repent, 
or change from the selfish to the social spirit, is 
the assurance that there stands waiting to receive 
them this nobler life of social service and this 
divine society of unselfish servants of God and 
their fellow-men. This was the gospel with which 
Jesus redeemed the world, when "he began to 
preach, and to say, Repent ye ; for the kingdom 
of heaven is at hand." 

It was not the promise of immunity from 
individual punishment in another world with 
which he won frightened adherents to his cause. 
It was by the immediate presentation of the 
nobler life and the social spirit, by the establish- 
ment of a society founded upon service, and a 
kingdom rooted and grounded in love, that he 
saved men from selfishness and sin and im- 
parted to the world a new and eternal prin- 



148 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

ciple of life. The entrance of that Holy Spirit, 
and the development and realization of that 
divine life will be the subject of the following 
chapter. 



CHAPTER VI 

REGENERATION AND GROWTH LIFE 

Even faith and grace leave God and man, though 
reconciled, still external to each other. God is the 
object of faith ; man is the object of grace. The 
union of God and man in a new life remains to be 
accomplished. This is the work of the Spirit, the 
Lord and Giver of Life. The entrance of the 
Spirit is regeneration. 

Without regeneration there can be no spiritual 
life. " Except a man be born anew he cannot see 
the kingdom of God." It is, however, a serious 
error to confine the Spirit's working to any mode 
of procedure, to expect it to be clearly denned in 
time, or to demand that the individual shall be 
explicitly conscious of the process. The new 
birth may come as suddenly as a flash of light- 
ning out of the midnight dark. More frequently, 
however, it comes as gradually and imperceptibly 
as daylight breaks upon the sleeping world at 
dawn. It may be occasioned by the burning 
words of preacher or evangelist at an evening 

149 



150 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

meeting. It may be due to the silent influence 
of a father's example and a mother's love, ex- 
tended over all the years of childhood and youth. 
It may manifest itself as a sudden revulsion from 
one's whole past, and a break with all one's old 
associations ; or it may be simply the fuller recog- 
nition of the significance of early training, and the 
more conscious acceptance of established princi- 
ples of conduct. It may be accompanied by almost 
any shade of feeling from agony to rapture ; and 
its practical expression may be anything between 
greater kindness and considerateness in the home 
to the most arduous foreign mission. " The wind 
bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the 
voice thereof, but knowest not whence it cometh, 
and whither it goeth ; so is every one that is born 
of the Spirit." 

As we have already seen, it is a serious mistake 
to regard the Holy Spirit as a mysterious force, a 
hidden fire, a heavenly dew, a holy gale, coming 
down only at special times and places, and then 
withdrawing for a season to his secret habitation. 
We have learned to recognize the presence of the 
Holy Spirit in every heart in which the seeds of 
the Gospel have fallen and borne fruit ; in every 
home where Christian principles are cherished 
and observed ; in the power of Christlike person- 



ANTH ROPOLOGICAL I 5 I 

ality which fathers and mothers have over chil- 
dren ; which teachers exercise over pupils ; which 
pastor exerts over people ; which friend has over 
friend. And if the Spirit be thus diffused and 
omnipresent ; then we should expect his working 
to be no less varied and multiform. 

Regeneration is the beginning of the process 
by which the raw material of sensuous impulse 
and natural appetite is worked over into moral 
virtue and spiritual grace. It is the entrance of 
God into man, through which the Spirit of God 
comes to dwell in us as a perpetual presence ; the 
abiding secret of all our peace, and the permanent 
source of all power. 

The Spirit is, in his very nature, not individual- 
istic, but social. The life of God in man must be 
a universal life. The Spirit of God is the Spirit 
of love. And the manifestation of the Spirit is 
chiefly in and through the institutions and practi- 
cal relations of society. The third part of this 
book will be devoted to the social expression 
which the indwelling Spirit makes in his outgoing 
life. 

Here we are concerned only with the begin- 
ning. It is self-evident that if there is to be a 
life of the Spirit in man, the beginning must be 
made. " Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye 



152 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

must be born anew." The reason why the abso- 
lute and universal necessity of regeneration is not 
more generally recognized, is that we have looked 
at the spiritual life as too individualistic. Now 
selfish and individualistic goodness, if there were 
any such thing, might conceivably be attained 
without the Spirit's aid. But social goodness is 
the very life of the Spirit ; and to be without the 
Spirit and to be without the life of unselfish social 
service is the same thing. 

If we turn away from abstract selfish concep- 
tions of virtue, and consider the concrete relations 
in which men stand to each other in society, we 
shall see at once that without regeneration there 
can be no true and worthy social life. Take the 
family, business, science and art, social intercourse 
and the state. In each of these spheres regenera- 
tion is an absolute necessity to the realization of 
its ideal. The principle of life which we derive 
from nature, and with which we all start out, is one 
that must be abandoned and destroyed, and a new 
principle or, rather, the Holy Spirit, must take its 
place, before a man is fit to be husband and father ; 
before he can be an honour to any craft or business 
or profession ; before he can deserve the name of 
scholar ; before he can adorn any circle of society ; 
before he can be a true and loyal citizen of any state. 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL I 5 3 

First : the family. No man can be rightly mar- 
ried who is not therein born anew. This is simply 
another way of saying that no man can be rightly 
married without love. For what is love, if it be 
not the death of the private exclusive self, which 
cares for none but self, and the birth within one 
of a newer, larger, richer self, which includes the 
being and welfare of another in the aims, interests, 
and affections which he calls his own. And this 
new life of unselfish love is ever the life of God ; 
the indwelling of his Spirit. 

Hence it is no metaphor, but plain, literal fact, 
that the well-married husband and wife are born 
anew ; and that except a man to this extent be 
born anew he cannot see the beauteous and blessed 
kingdom of family and home. He that climbeth up 
some other way is a thief and a robber. Whether 
that other way be the brutal way of gross passion 
and cruel lust ; whether it be the base way of 
deliberate self-seeking for wealth and family con- 
nections ; whether it be the giddy way of thought- 
less haste and sentimental glamour ; or whether 
it be the vulgar way of " the low-loving herd," who 
are fond "of self in other still preferred"; that 
other way, whatever it be, is sure to be thorny, 
treacherous, and troubled, and the end thereof is 
misery and woe. 



154 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

As long as two individuals retain their natural, 
separate selfhood ; as long as each seeks his own ; 
as long as each regards the other as means to his 
own ends, these individuals are unfit to be united. 
And the closer the bond that binds them, the 
more violently will they chafe against its fetters. 
Only those who are lifted by the Spirit into a new 
life of self-forgetful love can find the blessed life of 
harmoniously wedded souls. 

Second : labour and business. Honest industry 
and just commerce are the foundations on which 
rest all the amenities of life, the sanctities of 
home, the higher forms of social intercourse, and 
intellectual and political activity. Now it is not 
natural for man to do his work or go into busi- 
ness with any such conception of the social 
significance of his vocation as an artisan, or of 
his high calling as a business man. Men are by 
nature lazy. It is natural for the working man to 
shirk ; and to try to get the largest possible pay 
for the least possible expenditure of effort ; regard- 
less of the worth or worthlessness of the product 
of his work. The natural attitude of men toward 
business is that of swine toward a trough. It is 
natural for a man to get out of his business as 
much as he can, regardless of how he gets it, or 
whom he takes it from. 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL I 5 5 

Work done in this natural way is slavish and 
degrading". Business done on this natural plane 
dwarfs the heart, deadens the sympathies, and 
shrivels the soul. Except some idea of industry 
as a social function enter into and possess a man ; 
except he resolve to do good work whether his pay 
be large or small ; except the sacredness of the 
human interests that depend upon business appeal 
to him ; except the heroic ideal of business integ- 
rity lay its authoritative hand upon him ; except 
he be ready to maintain the costly right against 
the profitable wrong at all hazards ; in a word, 
except the larger interests of the industrial world 
be reflected in his individual breast ; except the 
Spirit of service and justice animate his soul, he 
cannot expect to find anything to his credit on the 
books of God. 

Third : science and art. We all know too 
well the natural approach to these things ; the 
delight in our own smartness ; the pride in what 
we know ; the ambition to win fame by some 
bold stroke or dashing performance. And yet 
we all know well that no true work was ever 
done in such a state ; that nothing good or true 
or beautiful ever came from man or institution 
or nation where such an atmosphere was preva- 
lent. We know what mean jealousies and petty 



156 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

strifes and bitter animosities such an attitude 
engenders among poets, painters, preachers, musi- 
cians, orators, scientists, and statesmen. We 
know, or ought to know, that nothing but false- 
hood and folly, hideousness and hate, can ever 
be the outcome of such an animus. 

The man who will write lines that shall be 
remembered, or speak words that men shall 
heed, or do work that shall endure, must quit 
trying to be smart. He must care little for 
the fate of his private, pet hypothesis who will 
extend the domains of real science. He must 
seek no short cut to fame who will depict on 
canvas or carve in stone real facts of nature 
in true forms of thought. 

So radical, so searching, so comprehensive, 
must be the change from the seeking of selfish 
satisfaction to the service of truth and beauty, 
in him who will be scholar and artist. The 
seed of the natural, private self must fall into 
the ground and die, before the better, higher self, 
born of the Spirit, can put forth the beauteous 
flowers of poetry and art, and mature the pre- 
cious fruit of science and philosophy. 

Fourth : social intercourse. Here again the 
natural attitude is one of subtle, but none the 
less real, self-seeking. The natural man is bent 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 157 

on making a good impression. He seeks not 
so much to give pleasure as to win the con- 
sideration and flattery which is the reward of 
giving pleasure. He fawns upon the rich and 
frowns upon the poor. He makes distinctions 
for the sake of distinctions, and is the upholder 
of an artificial aristocracy and caste. We all 
have seen the bitter fruits of this social self- 
seeking. Wherever it exists we find society 
honeycombed with bitter enmities and base sus- 
picions ; the heart all eaten out of it by burning 
jealousies and mutual distrust ; the soul con- 
sumed with suppressed hate and hidden grief ; 
the surface all crusted over with artificial form 
and ostentatious rivalry. 

Only when the Spirit of love enters, putting 
self last and others first, and generously devot- 
ing talents, beauty, wealth, position, and accom- 
plishments to the increase of happiness and the 
upbuilding of character in as wide a circle as 
kinship of spirit and community of interest can 
reasonably include, — only then are these gifts 
reclaimed from corruption ; only then is society 
justified and its members blessed. 

Fifth : politics. There are two seemingly op- 
posite, but radically identical attitudes toward 
politics, which it is equally natural to take. The 



158 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

indifferent man trusts that things will go about 
right any way ; he sees that he will make enemies 
and lose customers if he meddles with politics ; 
and so he lets politics alone. 

The ambitious man sees that with a little 
ready wit and a fluent tongue ; by spending a 
little money and doing a little dirty work, he 
can establish claims upon his party, which sooner 
or later will be rewarded with office and emolu- 
ments, patronage and power. Neither of these 
natural attitudes is patriotism. Patriotism is a 
fruit of the Spirit, which nature cannot evoke ; 
still less maintain. And that is why the mainte- 
nance on any considerable scale of a pure and 
devoted patriotism in times of peace and plenty 
has ever been the unsolved problem of repub- 
lics ; the unfulfilled duty of multitudes of other- 
wise estimable and honourable men. A Spirit 
higher than his own individual nature must come 
into a man ; making him see in city and state 
and nation a sacred worth, a social claim, a divine 
authority, so high above the pettiness of his pri- 
vate interests and personal ambitions that rivalry 
between them is impossible. 

In each and every sphere of social life a man 
must become in spirit, attitude, and aim, an en- 
tirely new creature, before he can realize the ideal 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 1 59 

of that sphere. What is true of the parts is true 
of the whole. Into social life in its broadest and 
highest significance ; into the kingdom which in- 
cludes all these separate spheres, no man can enter, 
except first the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of self- 
forgetful and unselfish service, the Spirit that 
recognizes objective and universal interests as its 
own, enter into him. "Verily, verily, I say unto 
thee, Except a man be born anew, he cannot see 
the kingdom of God." 

The man who has been born of the Spirit sees 
life, in all its departments — home, business, 
study, society, and politics — as one rounded and 
organic whole of which he is a conscious and 
co-operating member. One Father's thought em- 
braces this total life of man. One Filial Will is 
seeking realization in all its several departments. 
One Spirit animates it all. Before this all-em- 
bracing thought of the Father ; this all-conquering 
will of the Son ; this all-pervading life of the 
Spirit, the regenerated man lays down all mean 
and petty aims that are peculiar to himself as a 
private, particular individual ; and receives into 
himself as the substance of a new life the larger 
thought, the higher will, the purer purpose which 
he has found in God. Thus by the mighty trans- 
forming power of the Spirit, received and wel- 



l6o SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

corned into the heart of man, he passes from 
death to life, from strife to peace, from bondage 
to liberty, from the minding of the flesh to the 
minding of the Spirit, from identification with 
the merely natural will of his petty private self 
into identification with the glorious will of him 
who is the Institutor of the family, the Law- 
giver of business, the Source of truth and beauty, 
the Ideal of good-will and lovingkindness, the 
Founder and Judge of nations, the Creator of 
the world, and the Father of our spirits. 

As the new life begins in a new birth, not in 
an individual act, so its continuance is a gradual 
growth, not an artificial manufacture. Here we 
see the great difference between morality and 
religion. Morality undertakes to manufacture 
character : religion plants the seed, cultivates it 
patiently and faithfully, and waits for it to grow. 
The spiritual nature in man is a plant of slow 
growth. You can get quicker returns by the ar- 
tificial method of self-conscious moralizing. But 
to put out and keep out all lust, covetousness, 
malice, indolence, jealousy, falsehood, pride, and 
selfishness ; and to fill the life and keep it full of 
purity, generosity, energy, gentleness, meekness, 
kindness, and love ; that, or any considerable 
approximation to it, by the moral method of culti- 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 1 6 1 

vating one by one the separate moral virtues, is a 
sheer impossibility. The task is too vast ; the foe 
too subtle ; the will of man too weak and too incon- 
stant. The natural self is a veritable Hydra. For 
every vice you cut off two spring up afresh. The 
bad principle within us, as ascetics and subjective 
moralists ever have found and testified, is strength- 
ened by our attacks and consolidated by our blows. 
Morality points us in the right direction. We all 
owe our first steps in righteousness to this strict 
pedagogue. But it can take us such a little way ; 
it stops so far short of the goal ; and then the 
virtue it does attain is so self-conscious, so cold 
and formal, so akin to pride and so liable to the 
fall that always follows pride ; that those who have 
tried this method of a formal, legal, artificial self- 
righteousness most faithfully have been the first 
to acknowledge its shortcoming. 

Just because the transformation wrought by the 
Spirit is more deep and fundamental than that 
wrought by morality, it is more obscure in its 
working, and more slow in producing visible re- 
sults. The regenerated man will not be made per- 
fect all at once. And yet from the beginning his 
salvation is assured. Though temptation will still 
press hard upon him, though sins will still beset 
his path, though his falls will continue to be 

M 



1 62 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

many, yet he will have strength to resist, grace 
to repent, power to rise above it all. In the face 
of his worst failings and shortcomings he can 
say, " It is no more I that do it, but sin which 
dwelleth in me." In other words, it is not the 
new true self which he is resolved to be, not the 
self which he has received from God and which 
henceforth is to be the inmost centre of his be- 
ing ; it is the old, renounced, repudiated self that 
sins. It is the not yet arrested momentum of 
habits that are in principle abandoned ; it is the 
poisonous fruit still clinging to the branches of 
a tree which has been plucked up by the roots, 
which still mars the outward life with sin and 
shame. But from all present and permanent 
identification of heart and life with the repu- 
diated evil, the birth and growth within him of a 
new life gives him complete deliverance, assured 
salvation. 

The growth of the spiritual life is largely hidden 
and unconscious, like the growth of a seed. "So is 
the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed 
upon the earth ; and should sleep and rise night 
and day, and the seed should spring up and grow, 
he knoweth not how." 

Psychical research has been revealing curious 
facts of late. Things once thought miraculous, 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 163 

like the stigmata of the cross on the bodies of 
mediaeval saints, can be duplicated to-day wher- 
ever the hypnotizer can find a patient sufficiently 
susceptible ; careful experiments go far toward 
establishing the ability of peculiarly sensitive per- 
sons to read, without the aid of ordinary sensuous 
symbols, the contents of another mind. The fact 
that there may be in the same body, and con- 
nected with the same brain, two distinct selves, 
each ignoring the presence of the other, each in 
a way complementary to the other ; which take 
turns in occupying the field of consciousness, one 
self sleeping while the other wakes, one express- 
ing itself through the voice in speech while the 
other expresses itself through the hand in writ- 
ing, — these, and a host of similar facts, once 
denied and ridiculed, are coming to be accepted 
data of psychology. 

Now, when new facts do not fit into old the- 
ories, there is only one thing to do. We must 
make new theories large enough to give these 
new facts room. That is just what psychology 
is doing to-day. To explain these facts we are 
compelled to assume that the self is more than 
we are conscious of. As Mr. F. W. H. Myers 
has expressed it, there is a subliminal conscious- 
ness, so deeply buried that ordinarily we are not 



164 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

aware of its existence. Only when the flow of 
our ordinary consciousness is arrested or diverted 
does this deeper consciousness manifest itself. It 
is in this buried consciousness that all these 
powers inhere for which the upper or ordinary 
consciousness has no place and of which it can 
give no explanation. According to this view, the 
spirit or soul of man floats in nature like a solid 
in a liquid. A part only of the solid object is 
visible. The other part, and usually the larger 
part, is hidden beneath the surface. The self of 
which we are conscious is only one section, per- 
haps a small section, of the total self. 

" Below the surface-stream, shallow and light, 
Of what we say we feel — below the stream, 
As light, of what we think we feel — there flows, 
With noiseless current strong, obscure, and deep, 
The central stream of what we feel indeed. 11 

If, now, psychologist and poet are right ; if a 
large part of each man's self is below the thresh- 
old of his own consciousness and beyond the 
reach of his own observation, it behooves us in 
all our practical concerns to take account of this 
subconscious self. 

It is not the infinitesimal fraction of spiritual 
truth that we have apprehended already ; not the 
poor, petty experiences that we have gone through ; 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 1 65 

not the filthy rags of a righteousness with which 
we have succeeded in clothing ourselves, that con- 
stitute the worth of our religious life. It is the 
truth, not that we have gotten hold of, but that 
has gotten hold of us with such power that, though 
we know but little of it, we are sure there is 
infinitely more, and we surrender our minds to its 
gradual reception ; it is the experience, not that 
we have had, but that we are sure we might have 
and ought to have, and which we invite into our 
life by habits of consecration and devotion ; it is 
the conduct, not which we have wrought out as a 
finished achievement, but which we plant far in 
advance of present attainment as our ideal and 
goal, and vow never to cease our aspiration and 
endeavour until the ideal shall be real and the goal 
is won, — these are the deep and real grounds of 
Christian confidence. In other words, we are 
saved, not by retrospection, nor yet by introspec- 
tion, but, as Paul says, by hope ; by faith and not 
by works ; by aspiration toward what we shall be, 
not by satisfaction with what we are ; by the con- 
fession of Christ, not by the profession of our own 
religion ; by the reception of the Spirit, not by any 
merit in our natural selves. 

Two practical conclusions follow obviously from 
this recognition of the unconscious growth of the 



1 66 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

religious nature. First : we must make sure that 
we plant the seed of truth deep in the soil of mind 
and heart. When we plant seed in the ground, we 
cannot see it grow at first. We must have faith 
in what we cannot see. We must leave the seed 
to grow of itself. But we must plant it, to begin 
with. We must know that it is there. The ground 
does not bring forth fruit of itself. The sower 
must cast seed into the ground. And this is a 
conscious process. This is left for each man con- 
sciously to do for himself. The winds of heaven 
will sow all sorts of weeds and tares. The good 
seed must be selected and planted by the hand of 
man. 

Here, then, is the great question for each thought- 
ful mind to ponder : Have I planted the seed of a 
worthy character in my own heart, and am I 
watering it, and keeping the weeds down, day by 
day ? Notice, please, that the question is not 
whether the plant has grown to any particular 
height, or whether the fruit is ripe upon its 
branches. That is a minor matter. The question 
is simply whether I have consciously committed 
my heart to God ; whether I have taken Christ as 
my Lord and Master, my standard and ideal ; 
and whether day by day I am opening my heart 
in meditation, in aspiration, in communion, to him 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 167 

and to the gracious influence of his Spirit ? It is 
not a great thing, not a hard thing, to do. There 
is no possible excuse for waiting. The simplest 
creed, the slightest stirring of feeling, the feeblest 
genuine determination to do right, is all one needs 
to start with. This seed of a sincere acceptance 
of Christ as Lord, once planted, and faithfully 
watered and cultivated by systematic habits of 
devotion, will spring up and grow, and blossom 
into noble character and splendid usefulness. 

Having once received the Spirit, having planted 
the seed, we may trust this good seed to do its 
work in its own time and in its own way. Above 
all things, let us not pull it up by the roots every 
now and then to see how it is growing. Let us 
remember that we have just two things to do : to 
plant the seed, and to keep it provided with proper 
nourishment and care. And we may rest assured 
that if we do our part the seed will do the rest. 
We need not be impatient for the fruit. It will 
not come all at once. For a long time after plant- 
ing we shall see no visible signs of even the plant, 
to say nothing of bud and flower and fruit. That 
is the time when young Christians who have not 
pondered our parable fall into dejection and de- 
spair. They have planted the seed, and it has 
not come up. They have nothing to show for it. 



1 68 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

They have given their hearts to Christ, and he has 
given scarcely a token of recognition. They have 
no sure creed that they can proclaim ; no experi- 
ence that they can relate in meeting ; no manifest 
change in deportment to which they can point 
with pride as evidence of their conversion. Well, 
if the parable is true ; if there is a deeper self than 
that which appears upon the surface, this, far from 
being an occasion for regret, is evidence that the 
seed of a true Christian character is growing in 
just the humble, quiet, natural way in which God 
would have it grow ; in just the way in which 
Jesus tells us that it must grow, if it is to be a 
vigorous, healthy plant, and bear sound, sweet 
fruit at last. Silently and slowly, but steadily and 
surely, the truth that God's service is our first 
concern, the feeling that Christ's character is our 
supreme ideal, the determination that our life shall 
be lived in the Spirit of love which he imparted to 
the world — these ideals, principles, and aspirations 
are gradually transforming our ways of thinking, 
our currents of emotion, our springs of action. 
Let the good work go on. We must keep near to 
God by study of his Word, by submission to his 
will, by fellowship with those who are seeking to 
know and serve him. But we must think as little 
of ourselves as possible, and not stop to take ac- 



ANTH ROPOLOGIC AL 1 69 

count of stock of our spiritual attainments. The 
Bible does not tell us that we shall walk all the 
way by sight. It does not promise quick and 
visible returns for every investment. Have we 
really learned, with all our orthodoxy of creed and 
confession, the one great lesson, so simple yet so 
essential, that we are saved by the slow transfor- 
mation wrought within us by a cherished faith, not 
by the sudden exhibition of accomplished works ; 
and that the source of our salvation is the Christ 
whom we gradually appropriate by love and trust, 
and the Holy Spirit whom we receive ; not our 
own power to repeat a creed, or lead a meeting, or 
accomplish a reform ? 

Of course, in due time faith will produce appro- 
priate works ; the grown stalk will bear fruit after 
its kind. Yet here, too, we must have much 
patience with ourselves. We must not expect the 
ripened and perfected fruit all at once. Our first 
works will be failures and defeats ; our second, 
blunders and mistakes ; after that we may expect 
such partial and moderate success as invariably 
crowns fidelity and constancy and courage. Does 
this seem a gloomy and depressing prophecy ? It 
is merely a modern version of the words: "The 
earth beareth fruit of herself : first the blade, then 
the ear, after that the full corn in the ear." 



170 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

If the seed of a sincere and sustained desire 
and purpose to follow Christ is really planted in 
our hearts and watered by daily prayer and medi- 
tation, we may trust God implicitly ; trust the 
seed's inherent power ; trust the fertility of our 
own deeper nature ; and wait patiently for God to 
do his work. We shall fail ; we shall err ; we 
shall sin ; and for a long time our new purpose 
will manifest itself chiefly in overtaking our faults 
after they are committed ; and that, we saw, is 
penitence. By and by our new God-given pur- 
pose will grow stronger and gain upon the in- 
grained habits of selfishness and sin ; and then 
there will come many a bitter struggle into life. 
In the end we shall conquer ; and then our di- 
vinely implanted life will get the start of the old 
and dying impulses of crude, selfish, and sensual 
desire ; then the matured product of our long- 
buried faith will be manifest in a character con- 
firmed in righteousness, and a conduct visibly 
consistent with the spiritual standard so long in- 
visibly cherished. 

Then the wonder will be all the other way. At 
first we wonder that a man who has confessed 
Christ, and is honestly trying to follow him, can 
give so little evidence of it in conduct. This 
makes us critical and censorious of others, dis- 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL 171 

heartened and despairing about ourselves. When, 
however, we look on the mature and developed 
Christian, when we see such serenity in bereave- 
ment, such patience in trial, such fortitude in 
sorrow, such supremacy over appetite, such self- 
control in passion, such fidelity to the costly right 
against the profitable wrong, such loyalty to 
searching and unwelcome truth against easy and 
accepted error, such sympathy with the weak and 
suffering, and such fearless opposition to oppres- 
sive wealth and unrighteous power, then the won- 
der is all the other way, and we ask, How can 
such strong and sweet and noble character consist 
with frail human nature ? The answer, however, 
is not far to seek. Long ago, in the days of seed- 
time, there was sown in this soul the tiny seed of 
an earnest aspiration to become more and more 
like Christ. For weeks and months the seed lay 
buried, giving little or no outward proof of its 
presence, and even its possessor doubted at times 
whether it were actually alive. Then came the 
early years of failure and defeat ; then the years 
of sore temptation and bitter conflict, when the 
old self and the new fought desperately for the 
supremacy. And now the new life has so com- 
pletely conquered that the Spirit of Christ has 
become a second nature, putting forth the fair 



172 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

leaves of appropriate conduct, and bearing the 
precious fruit of Christian character. Then we 
understand the meaning of another closely re- 
lated parable which tells us that the kingdom of 
heaven is very small in its beginning, but very 
great in its final outcome. It is like "a grain of 
mustard-seed, which, when it is sown upon the 
earth, though it be less than all seeds that are 
upon the earth, yet when it is sown groweth up 
and becometh greater than all the herbs, and put- 
teth out great branches, so that the birds of 
the heaven can lodge under the shadow thereof." 



Part III 
SOCIOLOGICAL 



CHAPTER VII 

POSSESSION AND CONFESSION THE CHURCH 

Having gained the life of the Spirit, it might 
seem as if nothing remained for man to do but 
to keep it. Yet if we have apprehended this life 
aright we have seen that it is something which by 
its very nature refuses to be kept. God is the 
universal thought and will whom no finite mind 
can possibly contain. He is the whole of which 
our thoughts and purposes are but partial and 
fragmentary reproductions. And only by con- 
stant enlargement and perpetual endeavour can 
we keep in communion and fellowship with him. 
Christ is the moral and spiritual ideal ; never 
perfectly realized in us, and only by ceaseless 
striving can we retain our hold on him. The 
Spirit is the life of God and Christ in humanity ; 
and only by the continual outgoing of sympathy 
and service can we share his blessed life of love. 

Faith, hope, love, all the graces and qualities of 
the spiritual life, are social. They lead the indi- 
vidual out of himself into relations with others. 

*75 



176 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

Theology shows us God as implied in the rational 
and moral nature of man. Anthropology shows 
us man turning from sin in penitence, laying hold 
on Christ by faith, and received into the divine 
life by regeneration. Sociology shows us the union 
of God and man expressed in divine institutions, 
wrought out by human service, and embodied in a 
universal life of love in which the will of God is 
accomplished through the instrumentality of man. 

The life of the Spirit, as we saw in the last 
chapter, resembles a seed. To keep a seed is to 
kill it. It must be planted. It must be placed in 
vital relations with the great forces of nature. 
" Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a grain of 
wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by 
itself alone ; but if it die, it beareth much fruit. 
He that loveth his life [or his soul] loseth it." 
" If any man would come after me, let him deny 
himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow 
me." From the unprofitable servant who hid the 
talent it is taken away. The spiritual life is not a 
possession which the individual can enjoy off in 
a corner by himself. Unless he gives it unselfishly 
to others, and shares it generously with the world, 
it withers and shrivels to nothingness in his hands. 

The more vital and practical expressions of the 
spiritual life will be considered in later chapters. 



SOCIOLOGICAL \jj 

The formal manifestation of the spiritual principle 
concerns us here. 

The first duty of the man who has the spiritual 
life is to acknowledge it. If a man is ashamed of 
it, it is a sure sign that he has not got it ; or at 
least that he has it in a very unworthy and dis- 
torted form. No man can be ashamed of God, 
who has a worthy conception of his nature. No 
man can be ashamed of Christ, who has caught 
the faintest glimpse of the real nobleness of his 
character. No man can be ashamed of the spirit- 
ual life, who has entered ever so little into the 
secret of its divine unselfishness. 

A friend whom we are unwilling to acknowledge 
publicly as our friend, is no friend at all. 
" And I say unto you, Every one who shall 
confess me before men, him shall the Son of 
man also confess before the angels of God : but 
he that denieth me in the presence of men 
shall be denied in the presence of the angels 
of God." This is not a hard saying, pointing to 
a time in the far future when the offended Christ 
will pay back in their own coin those who have 
had the audacity to slight him. The man who 
refuses to confess Christ is lacking in the first 
principles of Christlikeness. He is either blind 
and cannot see Christ's character and worth ; in 



178 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

which case Christ could pity, but scarcely could 
confess him as already his follower and friend. 
Or else he sees and is ashamed to own it ; and 
then he is a coward, whom no amount of confes- 
sion by Christ, even if such confession were possi- 
ble, could ever make respectable and presentable. 

It is a maxim of psychology that " all mental 
states are followed by activity of some sort." 
Whoever has a worthy conception of God and the 
divine life must do something about it. He may 
confess it like a man ; he may conceal it like a 
coward. Between these two there is no middle 
ground. " He that is not with me is against me ; 
and he that gathereth not with me scattereth." 
Christ repudiates all weak-kneed, half-hearted fol- 
lowers with the curt remark that they are " not fit 
for the kingdom of God." Such unseasoned salt 
he tells them is " fit neither for the land nor the 
dunghill : men cast it out." 

The confession of Christ is not confined to the 
declaration of individuals. It finds its permanent 
and corporate expression in the church. The 
church is the organized and visible witness to 
Christ. It is the company of those who own him 
as Lord and Master, unite in the worship of the 
Father whom he revealed, and devote themselves 
to the service of the world he came to save. 



SOCIOLOGICAL 1 79 

The church is not in itself the kingdom of God. 
It is the training-school for it. The kingdom of 
God is realized in actual service of the world, in 
costly sacrifice for men ; in the heat of the con- 
flict ; and in the joy of achieved victory. The 
church is the institution where the life of ser- 
vice is systematically cultivated ; where the princi- 
ples of the kingdom are systematically taught • 
where the motives of loyalty are systematically 
inculcated. 

Dr. Gladden has happily compared the relation 
of the church to the kingdom of God with the re- 
lation of the brain to the body. He says, "The 
kingdom of heaven is the entire social organism 
in its ideal perfection ; the church is one of the 
organs, — the most central and important of them 
all, — having much the same relation to Christian 
society that the brain has to the body. The body 
is not all brain ; but the brain is the seat of 
thought and feeling and motion. A body without 
a brain would not be a very effective instrument 
of the mind ; society, without those specialized 
religious functions which are gathered up in the 
church, would not very readily receive and incar- 
nate and distribute the gifts of the Spirit of God. 

" And yet the brain is of use only as it furnishes 
to all the other organs and parts of the body feel- 



l80 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

ing and motion. The life and health of the brain 
are found only in ministering to the whole body. 
Exactly in the same way is the church related to 
all the other parts of human society. Its life is in 
their life : it cannot live apart from them ; it lives 
by what it gives to them ; it has neither meaning 
nor justification except in what it does to vitalize 
and spiritualize business and politics and amuse- 
ment and art and literature and, education, and 
every other interest of society. The moment it 
draws apart, and tries to set up a snug little eccle- 
siasticism, with interests of its own, and a cultus 
of its own, and enjoyments of its own — the mo- 
ment it begins to teach men to be religious just 
for the sake of being religious — that moment it 
becomes dead and accursed ; it is worse than use- 
less ; it is a bane and a blight to all the society in 
which it stands." 

The church is the inspirer and director of social 
service. The primitive church undertook not only 
to inspire and guide, but actually to perform a 
large amount of social work. The institutional 
church attempts to do that now. In both cases 
the assumption of such work has been justified 
by the circumstances. Where the social machin- 
ery for the care of the sick, the training of the 
young, the feeding of the hungry, the clothing 



SOCIOLOGICAL l8l 

of the naked, and the employment of the unem- 
ployed is lacking, as it was in the days when the 
church was founded, and as to a great extent it 
is in sections of our large cities to-day, then it is 
the duty of the church in its official and organized 
capacity to practise as well as to teach ; to per- 
form as well as to direct these social services. 

Yet, these are undeveloped and abnormal con- 
ditions. The more developed a community be- 
comes, the more specialized become its organs. 
Then charity, the housing of the poor, education, 
penology, are turned over to organizations and 
institutions especially designed to perform these 
particular services ; and the church is left free to 
do its special work of cultivating the social spirit 
and keeping alive the altruistic and reverent dis- 
position. The church continues to be responsible 
for the efficient performance of these social activ- 
ities ; but it exercises its power chiefly in the 
moulding of the institutions and the inspiring of 
individuals who do the actual work. 

There is, indeed, great danger that the church, 
when so largely relieved of actual service, will for- 
get to cultivate the spirit of service, and become a 
dead and fruitless cumberer of the ground. This, 
however, is the danger that all great opportunity 
involves. The college, with its four years of 



1 82 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

leisure, has a magnificent opportunity to train 
young men for service. And yet, we all know 
that this very opportunity is perverted into an 
excuse for idleness and a preparation for worth- 
lessness by a certain proportion of every college 
class. The church, like the college, must accept 
the greater opportunity, with its accompanying 
risks. A certain proportion of churches are 
doubtless mere cumberers of the ground. Yet 
that by no means disproves the importance of 
the really useful churches as trainers of men for 
service and self-sacrifice, for the worship of God 
and the upbuilding of man. No more useless and 
worthless and pitiful and contemptible creature 
walks the earth than the mere ecclesiastic, who 
strives to build up his church as an end in itself. 
They are the successors of the scribes and Phari- 
sees and chief priests who were so odious to Christ, 
and who brought about his crucifixion. Jesus 
ranked them below publicans and harlots ; and 
there are ecclesiastics in nearly every communion 
to-day, who are less genuine and frank and honest 
and disinterested than the gambler and the rum- 
seller whom they denounce. If one of the twelve 
was a traitor, we must not expect perfection in 
any line of apostolical succession. The church, 
like all human institutions, holds its treasure in 



SOCIOLOGICAL 1 83 

earthen vessels. But there is no more reason to 
abandon or despise the church on account of the 
frailty and insincerity and pretentiousness of some 
of its representatives, than there is to renounce 
allegiance to city or state or nation because alder- 
men are sometimes rascals and legislators have 
been influenced by bribes. That there are good 
priests and bad priests ; sensible clergymen and 
foolish clergymen ; laymen who are sincere and 
laymen who are insincere, may be more lamentable 
than the fact that there are intelligent physicians 
and quacks ; honest lawyers and dishonest lawyers ; 
competent teachers and incompetent teachers. 
But neither the profession of the ministry or of 
law or of medicine or of teaching is thereby dis- 
credited. 

The clear recognition of the function of the 
church as the school which trains and educates 
mankind in the spirit of social service makes clear 
the duty of the individual to take his place in the 
church, and the duty of society to generously 
support it. A man may contrive to secure a fair 
secular education apart from the secular schools 
and colleges. Yet in neglecting these established 
educational institutions, he places himself at a 
great disadvantage. The self-educated man is 
very apt to be narrow and one-sided ; and out of 



184 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

touch with the thought and interest of the 
educated world. And even if he succeeds in 
thoroughly educating himself, his independence of 
the school and the university is rather apparent 
than real. For even then he must read the books, 
enter into the thoughts, share the interests of the 
learned world. And these writings, thoughts, and 
interests are produced and developed and main- 
tained almost wholly by the institutions of learn- 
ing and the men whom these institutions train. 
So that even the self-educated man receives all 
the substance of his education indirectly through 
the established educational institutions ; and dif- 
fers from the regular graduate of these institu- 
tions only in that he has received the influence of 
the schools at second hand. 

In precisely the same way all members of the 
Christian community owe their highest ideals and 
most generous principles directly or indirectly to 
the church. The upright and virtuous man in a 
Christian community who stands apart from the 
church gets his spiritual education from the 
church at second hand. Through fathers and 
mothers who have been rooted and grounded in 
Christian character ; through ideals and standards 
which have been laboriously erected by centuries 
of Christian sacrifice ; through laws and institu- 



SOCIOLOGICAL 1 85 

tions which are founded upon Christian principles ; 
these self-righteous despisers of the church owe 
whatever superior virtue they possess to the un- 
recognized influence of this great school of virtue. 
Individuals here and there may live upright, 
virtuous, and truly Christian lives outside of the 
church ; just as individuals here and there develop 
genuine scholarship outside of the universities. 
But for effective influence in cultivating the 
virtuous disposition in others, and promoting the 
social spirit in the community at large, the man 
who stands apart from the church in a merely 
individualistic righteousness is almost as useless 
as the soldier who refuses to join a company or 
regiment or army, but shoulders his individual 
musket and starts out to fight his country's battles 
on his own account. Society without the organ- 
ized education in virtue and kindness and love 
which the church affords would be as helpless 
against the disintegrating forces of avarice and 
lust and selfishness and sin, as a city without 
police to protect it against crime, or a nation with- 
out an army to defend it against a foreign foe. 

There are two modes of reception into the 
church. The one presupposes Christian training 
in the home and the community ; and simply con- 
firms the character and faith already formed by 



1 86 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

this long process of Christian education. The 
other assumes that all that is not consciously 
Christian must be totally depraved ; and demands 
individual profession of faith and conscious experi- 
ence of grace as a condition of admission. The 
former method affords the broader basis of mem- 
bership ; and has the great analogy of the state's 
reception of its citizens upon its side. The latter 
method secures a higher average of piety and zeal 
in its membership : but it does this at the cost of 
excluding a large number of men who, while 
practically Christian in the purpose and tenor of 
their lives, do not wear their hearts upon their 
sleeves, and hesitate to make public profession 
of the more sentimental aspects of their per- 
sonal faith. This relegation of multitudes of the 
strongest, most efficient members of the commu- 
nity to a secondary place, as members of the par- 
ish but not members of the church, because they 
have not at some stated time become intensely 
conscious of a great and sudden spiritual change, 
and because they fail to express their faith in 
public prayer and pious exhortation, is the great 
weakness of churches of the Congregational or 
individualistic type. Democratic in their internal 
organization, they set up a sort of intellect- 
ual or emotional aristocracy as the condition of 



SOCIOLOGICAL 1 87 

admission. It is the churches which are organ- 
ized on the Episcopal principle which have the 
most democratic basis of fellowship ; and gain 
the strongest hold upon all sorts and conditions 
of men. 

Membership in the church is the privilege of all 
who accept the will of the Father as the rule of 
their lives ; who acknowledge Christ as the revealer 
and interpreter of the Father's will ; and who re- 
ceive the Spirit of love as the substance of the new 
life in which the will of the Father and the exam- 
ple of the Son is to be reproduced in themselves. 
Beyond this essential spiritual faith and trust and 
love, no assent to elaborate articles of intellectual 
belief should be required. If belief in God and 
confession of Christ and reception of the Spirit is 
not sufficient to form a bond of union between the 
members of a church, no assent to creed or profes- 
sion of dogma will make good that deficiency. 
Reliance on the efficacy of a creed for this purpose 
is virtual distrust of the Spirit. 

Creeds indeed, as we have already seen, have 
their place. Just as nations and states need con- 
stitutions, written or implied ; just as political par- 
ties need platforms ; so the church needs some 
formulation of its principles and some expression 
of its purpose. Such creeds or confessions, how- 



1 88 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

ever, should be regarded as the general sense of 
the majority, not as binding upon the conscience 
of the individual. 

A theological creed must in the nature of things 
always be more or less behind the times. Just 
because it is the conviction of the many, it cannot 
adequately represent the maturest convictions of 
the most competent few. A creed is valuable as a 
conservative force to preserve what is precious in 
the thinking of the past. When, however, it is set 
up as a barrier to the progressive thought of the 
present, it is mischievous and pernicious. Then 
belief in a dead creed is substituted for faith in the 
living God : and the church relapses into stagna- 
tion and decay. 

The Bible is the church's most precious heritage. 
The Bible is the history and literary expression of 
the life of God in humanity. As such, it is the 
product of the Holy Spirit. It is inspired. There 
are points of resemblance and points of difference 
between the inspiration of the Bible and the inspi- 
ration of other true and noble writings. In all 
genuine speech the truth uttered is something 
larger and deeper than the immediate creation of 
the individual speaker's mind. Unless the larger 
thought of the community and the deeper truth of 
nature and life come into him and demand utter- 



SOCIOLOGICAL 189 

ance through him, he can have nothing of impor- 
tance to communicate, and has no right to speak. 
Yet the inspiration of the Bible is deeper and 
clearer than this inspiration which is common to 
all honest literary men. It is the added inspira- 
tion of love and worship and service, which in very 
different degrees gives to the Sacred Scriptures 
the peculiar charm and authority they have. 
What Matthew Arnold says of the difference 
between the inspiration of Socrates and the inspi- 
ration of Jesus is true in a general way of the 
difference between the inspiration of the Bible 
and the inspiration of the average good book. 
" Socrates inspired boundless friendship and 
esteem ; but the inspiration of reason and con- 
science is the one inspiration which comes from 
him, and which impels us to live righteously as he 
did. A penetrating enthusiasm of love, sympathy, 
pity, adoration, reinforcing the inspiration of rea- 
son and duty, does not belong to Socrates. With 
Jesus it is different." The authority of the Bible 
rests on no external props and arbitrary claims. 
It proves its own inspiration and authority by its 
power beyond all other books to quicken and sus- 
tain the life of the Spirit. The response of the 
Spirit in the reader is the witness to the presence 
of the Spirit in the writers and their words. For 



190 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

the power to beget holy and unselfish living, the 
power to inspire brave and faithful service, the 
power to impart enthusiastic and devoted love to 
God and to one's fellowmen ; — this is ever the 
prerogative of the Holy Spirit ; the infallible 
proof of the presence of the Lord and Giver of 
life. 

The Bible represents the high-water mark of the 
spiritual life. It is pervaded by that first glow of 
spiritual enthusiasm which animated the hearts of 
those to whom the revelation of the Father first 
came with a freshness and simplicity which can no 
more again be equalled or surpassed than the epics 
of Homer, or the statues of Phidias, or the naivete 'of 
childhood. Its broad foundation in the most intense 
and ideal of national histories ; its genuine reflec- 
tion of the profoundest experiences of the human 
heart ; its realistic reproduction and at the same 
time its ideal interpretation of the life of the 
Master, and its presentation of the straightforward 
letters of the greatest apostle, combine to make a 
single book composed of many documents of which 
Professor J. R. Seeley, surely no partial judge, has 
truly said, " The unity reigning through a work 
upon which so many generations laboured, gives it 
a vastness beyond comparison, so that the greatest 
work of individual literary genius shows by the side 



SOCIOLOGICAL 191 

of it like some building of human hands beside the 
Peak of Teneriffe." 

The church may honour the Bible, just as a man 
may show his faith in a nugget of gold, in either 
of two ways. He may say, "This is gold; and 
because it is such a precious thing I will not trust 
it in so dangerous an element as fire, for fear that 
the precious thing might suffer harm." Or he 
may say, " This is gold ; and because it is gold I 
will not hesitate to trust it to the flames ; for fire 
can do pure gold no harm." The church may say 
of the Bible, "This book is God's gift to men; and 
therefore no honest criticism shall be allowed to 
touch it." Or it may say, "This book is a treas- 
ury of messages from God ; and therefore the 
more critically it is tested and the more honestly 
it is examined the brighter will its real jewels 
shine and the more precious will the whole be- 
come." 

Nothing short of the most artificial and perpet- 
ual and superfluous exercise of miraculous power 
could possibly have kept a book written in different 
ages and in different literary forms; employing the 
most various materials ; weaving together poetry 
and prose, legend and chronicle, statute-books and 
love poems, epics and lyrics, oral tradition and 
idealized interpretation, fact and fiction, precept 



192 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

and parable, from accumulating a good deal of 
incidental rubbish in the process of composition, 
compilation, and transmission. Reverent appreci- 
ation of the Bible as our ultimate literary expres- 
sion of the life of the Spirit does not compel one 
to accept blindly or to interpret literally every nar- 
rative or statement it contains. Here, as in all 
ancient history and literature, criticism has a great 
sifting process to perform. And the more search- 
ingly and thoroughly this is done, the more val- 
uable and reliable will the book become. It is a 
very timid and feeble faith in God, amounting 
really to downright unbelief, which fears that 
honest criticism of the Bible can either dis- 
credit the book or lead to distrust of its Author. 
Criticism will not take God and the divine life 
from any man who has once gained the stand- 
point of spiritual faith. Those to whom spirit- 
ual things are merely matters of tradition and 
hearsay doubtless may have the insecurity of 
their position revealed to them. But this would 
not be a permanent misfortune. If a man's faith 
is not in God, but in some dogma or tradition or 
institution, the sooner he discovers it the better. 
An institution whose essential life is so internal 
and spiritual as that of the church is in especial 
need of some outward and visible symbols by 



SOCIOLOGICAL 1 93 

which its inner purpose may be visibly expressed. 
The church has two such symbols or sacraments : 
baptism, and the Lord's supper. 

Baptism is the seal and symbol of regeneration; — 
the putting away of the natural, selfish, individual- 
istic life, and the reception of the life of the Spirit. 
The original method was doubtless, as a rule, that 
of immersion. In a warm climate, among peoples 
who live much out of doors, this is the natural and 
convenient method. In cold climates, on the other 
hand, where indoor life is habitual, sprinkling is 
the method which common-sense approves. The 
amount of material employed in a purely symbolic 
act is a matter of indifference. A signature to a 
note does not depend for its validity on whether 
it is written with a quill in bold John Hancock 
fashion, or is traced most delicately with a fine 
gold pen. 

The extension of the rite to infants is not 
directly sanctioned in Scripture, except by impli- 
cation, as children may be assumed to be in- 
cluded in the household. It is not logically 
deducible from the spiritual significance of the 
rite. And yet it sprang up out of an instinct 
of the parental heart which we can scarcely be- 
lieve that he who said " Suffer the little chil- 
dren to come unto me, and forbid them not," 
o 



194 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

would rebuke or repress. Little children have 
always been a puzzle to the logician and the 
theologian. They are not logical ; and their the- 
ology is very crude. But if Christian parents 
desire to solemnly dedicate their little ones to 
God and the divine life, in anticipation of the 
ratification and confirmation which maturity will 
bring, there surely can be no serious objection; 
and the bonds that bind the child's heart to Christ 
cannot be too early formed. 

As baptism marks the renunciation of self and 
the world as the determining principles of con- 
duct, the Lord's supper is the symbol of com- 
munion with Christ and his followers as the 
inspiration of the new life. There is nothing 
magical or miraculous about this most simple and 
natural of rites. Christ is present in the elements 
just as the writer of a letter is present in the 
writing. The reading of the letter is the recep- 
tion of the writer's mind and heart. We receive 
Christ in the bread and wine just as we receive 
a friend when we clasp his hand. All communion 
between persons must be by symbols. As Pro- 
fessor Dewey says in his Psychology, " The first 
step in the communication of a fact of individual 
consciousness is changing it from a psychical fact 
to a physical fact. It must be expressed through 



SOCIOLOGICAL 1 95 

non-conscious media — the appearance of the face, 
or the use of sounds. These are purely external. 
The next step in the communication is for some 
other individual to translate this expression, or 
these sounds, into his own consciousness. He 
must make them part of himself before he knows 
what they are. One individual never knows 
directly what is in the self of another ; he 
knows it only so far as he is able to reproduce 
it in his own self." 

Jesus, in instituting the Lord's supper, has 
simply made universal the communication of his 
sacrificial love. He has made the bread and wine 
forever, and to all who receive it, the symbol and 
expression of the life he lived and the death he 
suffered in love to all mankind. In itself it is 
mere bread and wine. Translated by the intelli- 
gent and devout recipient into terms of the love 
and sacrifice it is intended to express, it becomes 
the bread of life and the wine of love to as many 
as receive it in this faith. Being an objective in- 
stitution, coming at stated times and places, it is 
independent of the wayward caprice, the fickle 
mood, the listless mind of the individual. And so 
it calls us back from our worldliness, deepens our 
penitence, quickens our love, and intensifies our 
consecration ; and, above all, identifies us with the 



196 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

great company of our fellow-Christians, as no 
mere subjective devotion and private prayer could 
ever do. 

Jesus recognized the truth that everything spir- 
itual, if it is to become a permanent force in prac- 
tical life, must be embodied in outward and visible 
and tangible symbols. And at the same time he 
has guarded as far as possible against the super- 
stitious perversion of his symbols by choosing the 
most simple and universal elements and the most 
common and natural of acts to be the vehicles of 
his grace. 

The Sabbath, Good Friday, Easter, and Christ- 
mas are among the days which the church has 
reasonably and rightly claimed for its own spiritual 
purposes. As such they have sacred associations 
for those who share the Christian faith. Of these 
sacred days the Sabbath, by virtue of its frequency, 
its universality, and its associations with regular 
and systematic worship, is by far the most impor- 
tant. The Sabbath is as fundamental to the church 
as is election day to the state, or pay-day to indus- 
try. All Christians welcome this day as the great 
opportunity for the free and full expression of their 
faith and hope and love ; and the extension to 
others of the blessings which they themselves 
enjov. Abstinence from needless work, and the 



SOCIOLOGICAL 1 97 

release of others from all unnecessary labour, is 
essential to the best uses of the day. The civil 
authorities may rightly be invoked to secure for 
as many as possible opportunity for worship and 
rest and refreshment upon the Sabbath. Beyond 
the prevention of whatever interferes with the 
rights of others the church cannot wisely go in the 
attempt to dictate to those who do not share its 
faith the manner in which they shall spend the day. 
The Sabbath was made for man ; not man for the 
Sabbath. And the improvement of the Sabbath 
through the improvement of man, rather than the 
improvement of man through the enforced improve- 
ment of the Sabbath, is the more hopeful line of 
effort. Productive industry, except in cases where 
processes are of necessity continuous, or where 
materials cannot be left without serious waste, 
should be prohibited on the Sabbath ; not only in 
the interest of the church, but in the interest of 
that common humanity which it is the purpose of 
the church to serve. The Sabbath is the working- 
man's best friend ; and it should be the aim of the 
church to secure for him the largest possible im- 
munity from toil upon that day. The observance 
of the Sabbath should be joyous, free, and uncon- 
strained. In this as in everything, the man who is 
filled with the Spirit ; the man who seeks to make 



198 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

his life effective in social service, may do whatever 
he pleases on the Sabbath ; and whether he stays 
at home or goes abroad ; whether he fasts or 
feasts ; — whatever he does will be right and 
appropriate, because it will be prompted by love 
to God and love to man. On the contrary, any 
observance of the day which is not grounded in 
this glad recognition of the goodness of God and 
the fellowship of man, whether it be gay or 
gloomy, riotous or repressed, is injurious to man 
and dishonouring to God. Worship, rest, and 
refreshment ; worship that includes thoughtful 
regard for the rights and needs of one's fellow- 
men ; rest that restores and invigorates the 
powers of body and of mind for service in the 
days to come ; refreshment that binds the family 
closer together in common joys and mutual inter- 
ests and heartfelt sympathies, and lifts the indi- 
vidual out of the isolation of his merely animal 
existence, — these are the social purposes which 
the Sabbath is instituted to subserve. 

Every institution must have some sort of consti- 
tution or polity. Every body must have some form 
of organization and some kind of authority. Polity 
is a means, not an end ; and that polity is best 
which binds together the members of the church 
most effectively for their common work and wor- 



SOCIOLOGICAL 



I 99 



ship, and at the same time leaves them most free 
in the development of their individual characters 
and lives. A polity is none the better for being 
ancient and primitive. The apostles in their first 
attempt at ecclesiastical organization resorted to 
the crudest conceivable device for the election of 
an officer ; a device which had been a favourite 
object of ridicule with Socrates, as it was applied 
in his day in Athenian politics; — the election 
of an officer by lot. If when monarchical ideas 
were dominant in the state, the primitive church 
adopted an Episcopal form of government, it does 
not follow that episcopacy is the best polity in a 
democratic age. If, on the other hand, the little 
groups of believers were organized on the Congre- 
gational plan in the early days when the infant 
church could count but few adherents, it does 
not follow that that form of polity is the one best 
fitted to organize the universal church and to 
conduct world-wide activities. The organization 
of the primitive church is an interesting problem 
for the church historian. The organization of the 
church to-day is a practical problem which Chris- 
tian common-sense must settle for itself. What- 
ever polity will afford the maximum of unity and 
efficiency with the minimum of machinery and 
constraint, should be accepted as the ideal to be 



200 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

realized as rapidly as historic traditions and exist- 
ing conditions will permit. 

The church has offices which bear different. 
names in different communions. The most im- 
portant of these offices is that of the priesthood or 
ministry. The office of the priest is not quite the 
same as that of the minister. The priest conceives 
himself to be the official representative of Christ ; 
and as such is prepared to hear confession and 
pronounce absolution. The minister conceives 
himself to be the herald or messenger of Christ ; 
and as such preaches and proclaims the message 
of forgiveness and inspiration ; but refers his 
hearers directly to Christ for the guidance and 
grace they need. 

The priest's conception of his function is the 
more profound and vital : but for that very reason 
it is the more liable to perversion. It has been 
fruitful of the most haughty pride, the most 
extravagant pretensions, the most tyrannical domi- 
nation, the most mercenary extortion on the part 
of sacerdotalists who have grasped the power 
without cultivating the humility and sympathy on 
which the right exercise of such a high prerogative 
depends. The minister's conception of his func- 
tion as chiefly that of preaching is more superfi- 
cial : but on that account less open to abuse and 



SOCIOLOGICAL 201 

misconception. Still there is great danger that 
the preacher will come to regard his sermon as an 
end rather than as a means; and that in place of 
what he regards as the idolatry of the altar, he 
will introduce the idolatry of eloquence and ora- 
tory. When the sermon thus becomes an end in 
itself, throwing the service of prayer and praise 
into the background, preaching degenerates into 
the hollowest and emptiest of forms, and merely 
presents 

" a painted ship 
Upon a painted ocean." 

The conceptions of the priesthood and of the 
ministry are complementary half-truths. Christ 
and the Spirit are present in regenerated humanity 
so immediately and intimately that when the true 
priest absolves a penitent he therein imparts 
directly the divine forgiveness. Yet the priest 
needs to remember that this absolution is no 
magical performance, but is the expression of 
sacrificial love ; and he should spare no effort of 
mind and heart to impress upon the penitent the 
cost of sacrifice and the depth of love which makes 
forgiveness possible. On the other hand, hearing 
is essential to believing. Yet the preacher needs 
to remember that mere hearing, apart from per- 
sonal repentance and intimate appropriation of 



202 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

grace and actual reception of the Spirit, is idle 
and profitless. 

The minister, like every true Christian, is a 
servant of his fellow-men. The minister differs 
from other Christians simply in that he serves 
them in the highest way, and ministers to them 
in purely spiritual things. It is his function to 
give embodiment and expression to that Spirit 
of love, fellowship, forgiveness-, inspiration, and 
grace which is the life of society, and is striving 
for admission to the hearts and homes of men. 
The office is no substitute for the spiritual life 
of him who holds it ; though what the office 
signifies may do its beneficent work in spite of 
the unworthiness of the incumbent. Yet the 
richest fruit of the Christian ministry can only 
come when the Spirit, acting through the officer 
of the church, is reinforced by the same Spirit, 
acting through the heart and conscience of the 
man. Such a priesthood or ministry as that is 
the highest, purest, noblest, and most blessed 
form of social service. It is a reproduction of 
the personal life and a continuation of the 
spiritual work of Christ. 

The division of the church into sects, which is 
so marked a characteristic of the present time, 
represents the extreme consequences of the prac- 



SOCIOLOGICAL 203 

tical application of that principle of individual 
liberty and the right of private judgment which 
was affirmed in the Reformation, and has been 
reaffirmed in the political revolutions in France 
and America. Politically that principle received 
its needed check when the doctrine of secession 
was defeated in our civil war. Liberty has been 
sufficiently affirmed ; and the problem of the 
present is to advance "from liberty to unity." 

The sects have arisen through the differentia- 
tion of the Christian principle, and the attempt to 
develop special organs for special forms of work 
and peculiar types of temperament. God and his 
truth are very great : man and the average mind 
of man are very small. The best of us get but 
partial* glimpses of his glory. One sees one aspect 
of the divine ; another, another. Each has some 
line of strength ; each some weakness, peculiar to 
itself. As the colours of the solar spectrum are so 
many partial reflections of the white light of the 
sun, so the sects are so many partial apprehen- 
sions of the one great fact of the love of God 
manifested in Jesus Christ, and imparted to 
humanity as the Spirit of a new life of human 
love. 

None of them is perfect. It is easy to point 
out defects. The Congregationalist has not a 



204 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

sufficiently coherent polity. The Baptist has not 
a sufficiently broad basis of fellowship. The 
Methodist has not a sufficiently edifying grasp 
of the ethical and spiritual principles upon which 
permanent character must rest. The Episco- 
palian has not a sufficiently democratic concep- 
tion of the sources of spiritual authority. The 
Unitarian has not a sufficiently definite body of 
doctrine. The Presbyterian has not a sufficiently 
receptive attitude toward historical and scientific 
investigation. The Universalist has not a suffi- 
ciently keen sense of the responsibilities of human 
freedom. The Roman Catholic has not sufficient 
respect for human reason, and the rights of the 
individual man. 

Yet each of these forms of church has arisen to 
meet definite needs in the history of Christian 
thought and life. Each has borne especial wit- 
ness to some essential element of the catholic 
faith. 

The Congregationalist has stood for simplicity 
of worship, clear theological ideas, and the su- 
preme authority of a rationally interpreted Bible 
as against all meaningless formalities, all doubtful 
traditions, all mystical interpretations. The Bap- 
tist has protested against all cheapening and 
change in the divinely ordained sacraments. The 



SOCIOLOGICAL 205 

Methodist has kept live coals upon the altar of 
Christian consecration in hearts and homes and 
hamlets, which otherwise would have been dreary 
and desolate, and the way of repentance open to 
multitudes of wanderers who without it had been 
lost. The Episcopalian has preserved the decency 
and order of dignified worship, and an organic 
fellowship, in an iconoclastic and individualistic 
age. The Presbyterian has made clear how love- 
less a creature man is apart from God ; traced 
minutely the process by which the grace of Christ 
gains entrance to the soul ; marked off precisely 
the stages of the Spirit's conquest ; and so kept 
right teaching or orthodoxy alive when doubt and 
unbelief have been widespread. The Unitarian 
has affirmed the right of free inquiry when others 
have distrusted the God-given faculties of man. 
The Universalist has clung to the grace of God 
when others have made him almost a demon in 
the severity of his arbitrary rule. The Catholic 
has held the strong arm of spiritual authority over 
great masses of men and women, who would have 
found little restraint or guidance in the more 
speculative and individualistic types of Protestant 
religion. 

Sects are evil only when they become sectarian ; 
that is, when differences of apprehension count for 



206 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

more than the object apprehended; when every- 
thing is spent on fences, while the fields them- 
selves are given over to weeds and briers. 

Inherited associations are stronger than abstract 
ideas. The attempt to bring the denominations 
together by compromise creeds, compromise poli- 
ties, union houses, and union meetings gives little 
promise of success. The union of the churches, 
for the near future at least, must consist in a 
unity of spirit and a cooperation in work. In this 
direction there is good ground for hope. 

The first step toward such unity of spirit and 
work is a geniune and hearty respect for the 
points of excellence in other forms of church life 
as well as in our own. In polity, for example, 
the two fundamental types are the Episcopal and 
the Congregational. The strong point in Episco- 
pal polity lies in its recognition that the mind and 
heart of the church in all lands and ages is a 
better interpreter of the mind of Christ than is 
the individual believer and the local church. The 
strong point in Congregational polity is its asser- 
tion that the mind of Christ does find expression 
in the hearts of individual believers here and now. 
Both these positions are true and important. 
Both may be carried to extreme and dangerous 
lengths. Let each respect the other ; let each 



SOCIOLOGICAL 207 

ingraft upon his own system the good points of 
the other, and gradually the two extremes will 
be brought together. We see this tendency 
already. The Episcopal bishops interfere much 
less than formerly in the internal affairs of the 
local churches; and the Congregational churches 
are giving to their missionary secretaries and 
the heads of their benevolent societies more 
and more of the authority of bishops. 

The two opposite types of worship are the 
Roman Catholic and the Quaker. One makes 
liberal use of sensuous symbols ; the other limits 
the expression of worship more or less strictly 
to extemporaneous speech. Both tendencies have 
their worth and their dangers. Both are symbolic, 
as all forms of worship must be. Even extempo- 
raneous speech uses vibrations of air as the sym- 
bol of thought and feeling. Why are vibrations 
of air striking the ear essentially more holy than 
vibrations of ether striking the eye, or even parti- 
cles of incense impinging on the olfactory nerve ? 
Speech is doubtless the more adequate and subtle 
and universal symbol. But it is just as truly a 
symbol as the wearing of a vestment, the swinging 
of a censer, or a posture of the body. Here, 
again, we may observe the non-ritualistic churches 
enriching their barren services by the larger use 



208 SOCIA1 rHEOLOG\ 

of ritualistic elements ; and we may expect a 
larger recognition of the place of spontaneity in 
worship on the part of ritualists. 

Thus there is a work in the direction of union 
which each individual can do within his own 
denomination ; in casting- out the arbitrary, fan- 
tastic, and divisive practices and doctrines that 
tradition and bigotry have fastened upon it, and 
ingrafting upon it the better fruits in which other 
denominations excel his own. 

If he is a Presbyterian, his first duty is to labour 
for liberty of thought and the right of investiga- 
tion ; if a Unitarian, for clear conviction of defi- 
nite religious truth ; if a Baptist, for breadth of 
Christian fellowship and emphasis upon essentials ; 
if a Methodist, for rational conviction rather than 
emotional expression of his faith ; if a Universal- 
ist, for keener sense of the fateful pregnancy of 
choice ; if a Catholic, for liberty and local self- 
government ; if a Congregationalist, for larger 
recognition of the organic nature of society and 
social institutions ; if an Episcopalian, for that 
emancipation from the leading-strings of doubtful 
tradition and fantastic frivolity, and that reliance 
upon spiritual realities and practical common- 
sense of which Bishop Brooks was the conspicuous 
representative. 



SOCIOLOGICAL 209 

The extension of itself by missionary effort is 
always an important branch of church activity. 
And in this work there is the most urgent need 
of the substitution of cooperation for competition. 

Especially in home missionary work in rural 
regions such cooperation is essential. However 
valuable and natural the differentiation of the 
church into sects along lines of tradition or creed 
or temperament may be in the city and large 
town, it is too expensive a luxury for rural dis- 
tricts to indulge in. In every line of enterprise, 
the methods best adapted to the city are not 
those best adapted to the country. The graded 
system of schools, which is the glory of public 
education in cities and large towns, would be the 
ruin of sparsely settled regions. The district 
school must teach all grades. The city can afford 
to have one store for dry goods, one for groceries, 
one for boots and shoes, one for music, one for 
millinery. But the country store must keep every- 
thing, from pins and peppermints to shovels and 
horse-rakes. The church of Christ cannot afford 
to spend its money in carrying some special 
variety of the Gospel to communities which have 
more varieties than they can support already. 
Yet that is what we have been doing for years. 
And, in consequence, we find throughout the rural 
p 



2IO SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

regions needless organizations, empty churches, 
half-paid ministers, wasted strength, scattered 
resources. We do not find in these communities 
strong, vigorous churches, uniting the intelligence, 
the resources, the society of the whole village in 
uplifting worship, hearty good-fellowship, dignified 
social life, and aggressive Christian work. 

The duty of cooperation in church exten- 
sion is imperative from every point of view. 
We owe it to the contributors who support 
home missions. The contributions for home 
missions in the United States for 1890 were 
$6,717,558.03. At the very lowest estimate one 
quarter of this sum (if you could pick out the 
right quarter, the quarter that went for the sup- 
port of superfluous churches) would have done 
more good if it had been cast into the depths of 
the sea. It was spent not for the building up of 
the kingdom of God, but for the building up of 
particular denominations at the expense of and 
to the injury of the kingdom of God. 

We owe it to the brave and devoted mission- 
aries who are working to keep the old towns of 
the East and the new towns of the West faithful 
to the standards of Christian living. They have 
responded to the call of the church for volunteers 
in its most arduous service. Like loyal soldiers 



SOCIOLOGICAL 2 1 I 

of the cross, they have gone where their com- 
manders have ordered : 

"Not though the soldier knew 

Some one had blunder'd. 
.- Theirs not to make reply, 

Theirs not to reason why, 

Theirs but to do and die." 

Alas ! in this case it is not that some one has 
blundered. Our whole plan of founding churches 
in rivalry and maintaining them in competition is 
one gigantic blunder. And a large proportion 
of the men who enlist for missionary service 
under this system are betrayed into needless 
sacrifice for a hopeless cause ; needless, because 
a wiser policy of cooperation would have per- 
mitted others to do the work which they were 
sent to do ; hopeless, because there is not enough 
material for all the labourers to work upon to good 
advantage. 

In business such blunders bring bankruptcy. 
In war, such blunders cost officers their commis- 
sions. We owe it to our noble army of mission- 
aries, home and foreign, to adopt a policy of 
cooperation which shall guarantee to every man 
who enters the service that his life shall not be 
spent in vain. 

We owe it to the people whom we seek to 



212 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

evangelize. It is not of much use to make a 
man a Republican or a Democrat unless you also 
make him a patriotic citizen. It is not of much 
use to make a man a Baptist or an Episcopalian, 
unless you also make him a Christian. Yet the 
tendency of the minute subdivision of the church 
in small towns is to make men sectarians without 
making them Christians. There is enough that is 
petty and narrow in rural life, without introduc- 
ing into it sectarian rivalry and strife. 

We owe it to Christ and our common Chris- 
tianity. Christ came not to be ministered unto, 
but to minister. The church should do likewise, 
or else do nothing. Unless the church can be a 
benefactor to the spiritual life of a community, 
unless it can be a leader of its daily work, a law- 
giver to its business and political morality, a 
sanctifier of its social life, an educator of its 
youth in virtue, a comforter of its homes in 
sorrow, a safeguard of its manhood against temp- 
tation, it has no business there. Yet under the 
system of rivalry, these cannot be the most 
prominent features which the church presents. 

It is as circulators of subscription-papers, as 
managers of competing festivals and fairs, as orig- 
inators of rival money-making devices, as centres 
of oratorical, musical, or ceremonial attractions that 



SOCIOLOGICAL 213 

these superfluous and feeble churches figure in 
the public eye. We must adopt the policy of 
planting strong, self-respecting, self-supporting, 
community-serving churches where they are 
needed, in place of the wretched policy of thrust- 
ing in mendicant, impotent, self-seeking, com- 
munity-plundering churchlings where they are 
not needed. The churches should not stand as 
beggars asking alms alike of saint and sinner, 
but be a mighty power to help the poor man, 
be he virtuous or vicious, and to rebuke and awe 
the knave and the oppressor, whether he be poor 
or rich. 

Hundreds of abandoned churches, thousands of 
superfluous organizations, millions of squandered 
money, hosts of martyr missionaries, proclaim 
the need of radical reform. Christian coopera- 
tion in church extension is no far-off vision of 
a formal union ; no speculative theory of an 
ultimate catholic church. It is a plain duty 
which the churches as they are now con- 
stituted can and ought to do at once. That 
the doing of this duty now will lead to large 
results in the future we may well believe. That 
it will at once reduce to uniformity the diverse 
forms of church life which exist to-day, no one 
need fear. We may, however, speedily bring to 



214 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

pass what is more in harmony with the organic 
life of nature, with the trend of history, with 
the spirit of our civil government. We may 
develop, not the unity which is a dead and 
monotonous absence of difference ; not the 
unity which is a shallow and superficial ignoring 
of difference ; not the unity which is an arbitrary 
and tyrannical suppression of difference : but the 
deeper, richer, mightier unity which is founded on 
difference, and is expressed through the har- 
monious cooperation of many members in one 
common life. The dream of an American church 
may be as idle as the dream of an American 
empire. Yet, as out of the voluntary conference 
of independent colonies for defence against a 
common foe, and the establishment of a mutually 
profitable commerce, there has grown the union 
of the United States, with supreme authority in 
national affairs ; so out of the cooperation of inde- 
pendent denominations against the common foe 
of sin and for the establishment of that Christian 
righteousness which is the common object of 
them all, may be raised up the united churches 
of America, clothed with the supreme authority 
of wisdom and of love, to guide and guard the 
spiritual interests of the land. 



CHAPTER VIII 

ENJOYMENT AND SERVICE THE REDEMPTION OF 

THE WORLD 

The divine life does not consist in preaching 
and praying and singing psalms : though these are 
important and well-nigh essential means of keep- 
ing it alive and fostering its growth and promot- 
ing its extension. The spiritual life is composed 
of solider stuff than cadences and candles, music 
and millinery ; though these may serve for its 
decoration and embellishment. If the church is 
the form ; the family, industry, economics, politics, 
education, society, constitute the solid substance 
on which that form must be impressed and in 
which it must be realized. 

This glorious work of helping to complete God's 
fair creation ; this high task of making human life 
and human society the realization of the Father's 
loving will for all his children; — this is the real 
substance of the spiritual life, of which the ser- 
vices and devotions of the church are but the out- 
ward form. Each has its value in relation to the 

215 



2l6 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

other. They ought not to be separated. Yet if 
we can have but one, social service is of infinitely 
more worth than pious profession. As Jesus tells 
us in one of his parables : " A man had two sons ; 
and he came to the first, and said, Son, go work 
to-day in the vineyard. And he answered and said, 
I will not : but afterward he repented himself, and 
went. And he came to the second, and said like- 
wise. And he answered and said, I go, sir : and 
went not. Whether of the twain did the will of 
his father? They say, The first. Jesus saith unto 
them, Verily I say unto you [and it applies to all 
mere ecclesiastics the world over] that the publi- 
cans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God 
before you." 

One of the first-fruits of the Spirit, as Paul tells 
us, should be joy. The Christian man above all 
others has a right to enjoyment. The Creator of 
this glorious world ; the Maker of all things in it 
beautiful and fair ; the Author of that wondrous 
volume of truth which science is opening to us ; the 
Composer of those infinite harmonies which music 
suggests; the Artist of that inexhaustible realm of 
beauty which human art aims to reproduce ; the 
Source of those unfathomable depths of sweet sym- 
pathy which human friendship and love reveal : — 
this Infinite Author of all good the Christian knows 



SOCIOLOGICAL 21 7 

as his Father and his Friend. Knowing himself 
to be the child of such a Father, he will be eager 
to take up his inheritance. He will not despise 
the joys of sense and flesh. For these are God- 
given and divinely ordained. As Browning has 
taught us so grandly, he will see that 

"All good things are ours, 
Nor soul helps flesh more now than flesh helps sou].'" 

Like him he will see his ideal in the man who 

" Gathers earth's whole good into his arms.'" 

With him he will exclaim, 

" How good is man's life, the mere living, how fit to employ 
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy." 

A healthy, hearty, grateful enjoyment of this sen- 
suous nature God has given us follows directly 
from the fatherhood of God, which is the first 
article of Christian faith. 

The church has sometimes forgotten this. 
Shocked by the fearful evils which spring from 
excess and perversion of sensuous enjoyment, the 
church has too frequently been afraid of sensuous 
pleasure. It has sometimes held up as its ideal a 
gloomy asceticism, a joyless sanctimoniousness ; 
and seemed to demand the crucifixion of these 
impulses and instincts that beat so wildly in 
the hearts and flow so swiftly in the veins 



218 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

of strong-limbed boys and light-hearted girls. 
Terrible has been the penalty wherever that blun- 
der has been made. It has doomed thousands of 
lovely young women, without as well as within 
convent walls, to lives of morbid introspection and 
stolid self-repression. It has driven tens of thou- 
sands of our strongest and noblest young men to 
dissipation and destruction. It has given over 
multitudes of churches to stagnation and anility. 
And all this has been done in the name of Him 
who came eating and drinking ; who was present 
and participating at festivities and feasts ; suffi- 
ciently free and joyous in his mode of life to give 
the pretext of truth which every false charge must 
have behind it, which made it possible for his 
enemies to call him a glutton and a wine-bibber. 
As followers of Christ, no less than as children 
of the Father, we must recognize the divineness 
of the body ; the sacredness of even sensuous 
delights. 

The mind too, from the Christian point of view, 
is divine. And all that ministers to our love of 
truth ; all that feeds our hunger for beauty of form 
and harmony of sound; all the objects at which 
education aims, must be dear to the Christian. 
For they are all tokens of the Father's love to his 
children ; they are all means by which we may 



SOCIOLOGICAL 219 

grow into his likeness, and enter into his thoughts 
and purposes. Social institutions ; the home, the 
school, the library, the town, the state, the nation, 
the farm, the factory, the counting-house; the club, 
the social circle ; all are ways in which the Spirit 
of God is moulding and inspiring the life of man ; 
and in which it is man's privilege to find healthful 
and rational delight. 

In a civilized and select community, composed 
chiefly of well-to-do persons, this side of life takes 
care- of itself, and does not need emphasis. But 
in dealing with uncivilized races, as the American 
Indians ; or with races just emancipated from 
bondage, like the negro in America ; or with 
classes who have lapsed from decency and self- 
respect like the inhabitants of the neglected 
quarters of our large cities, the first and the 
only effective steps toward their moral and social 
improvement are the inculcation of a desire to 
hold property ; the capacity for steady industry ; 
an interest in good pictures and good music and 
good books ; a regard for personal comfort and 
personal cleanliness. 

The social settlement and the industrial school, 
which carries the substance of civilization, rather 
than the mission which carries the form of evan- 
gelization, is the effective agency for the redemp- 



220 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

tion of these classes. Evangelization without the 
rudiments of education, and discipline in simple 
industry, healthful living, and wholesome enjoy- 
ment, is as useless as the casting of seed upon un- 
ploughed land. Here and there a single seed may 
take root and spring up. But the harvest will be 
insignificant in comparison with that yielded by 
the more thorough and rational method. We shall 
never succeed in abolishing the saloon, the gam- 
bling-room and the brothel, until we provide in other 
ways the comfort, amusement, and good-fellowship 
which many who frequent these places do not now 
find elsewhere. 

Wholesome, healthful, rational enjoyment is the 
foundation of civilization and Christianity alike. 
If we do not realize it more clearly, it is because 
in the circles in which we move it is as common as 
the atmosphere we breathe. Or if it be wanting 
in individual cases, the absence of it is instinc- 
tively and sedulously concealed. The effort to 
reach those who lack this rational enjoyment is 
necessary to convince us how essential it is to 
ourselves. 

This easy-going optimism, though an essential 
element in the spiritual life, is by no means the 
whole of it. God is our Father : and that thought 
makes us glad. God is equally the Father of 



SOCIOLOGICAL 221 

all ; even of the wretched and the wicked ; and 
the thought that they know so little of his good- 
ness, and have entered so little into their inheri- 
tance, should make us sad. The enjoyment of 
God's good gifts is, indeed, our rightful privilege 
as his children. All that is true ; and yet in 
practical life this truth must be supplemented 
by a deeper truth, and be modified by a higher 
law. 

That deeper truth is the existence of evil ; 
and that higher law is the law of improvement 
through service and redemption by sacrifice. 
Highly as he knew how to prize the world's 
good things, our Lord declares that a man's life 
consisteth not in the abundance of goods that 
he possesseth. The same poet who has already 
sung for us the praises of the sensuous life also 
writes : 

" Poor vaunt of life indeed 
Were man but formed to feed 
On joy, to solely seek and find and feast; 
Such feasting ended then 
As sure an end to men. 

Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw- 
crammed beast? 

" Rejoice, we are allied 
To that which doth provide 
And not partake, effect and not receive! 



222 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

A spark disturbs our clod : 

Nearer we hold of God 

Who gives, than of his tribes that take, I must believe. 

" Then welcome each rebuff 
That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go ! 
Be our joys three parts pain ! 
Strive and hold cheap the strain ; 
Learn, nor account the pang ; dare, never grudge the throe." 

Service not less than enjoyment is our privi- 
lege. As Carlyle has taught us with such empha- 
sis, " Work is worship. All true work is relig- 
ion. Older than all preached gospels was this 
unpreached, inarticulate, but ineradicable, forever- 
enduring gospel : Work, and therein have well- 
being. All true work is sacred ; in all true work, 
were it but true hand labour, there is something 
of divineness." "Two men I honour, and no 
third. First, the toilworn craftsman that with 
earth-made implement laboriously conquers the 
earth, and makes her man's. A second man I 
honour, and still more highly : him who is seen 
toiling for the spiritually indispensable ; not daily 
bread, but the bread of life. If the poor and 
humble toil that we have food, must not the 
high and glorious toil for him in return, that 
he have light, have guidance, freedom, immor- 
tality? — These two, in all their degrees, I hon- 



SOCIOLOGICAL 223 

our ; all else is chaff and dust, which let the 
wind blow whither it listeth." 

The best things in the world do not come to 
us ready-made. God has given us the material 
conditions of a blessed life. . In Christ we have 
the pattern and principle of such a life. Yet 
the actual work of making life noble and beau- 
tiful and enjoyable he has left for ourselves. 
Truth must be searched for with patient toil. 
Beauty must be wrought out with painstaking 
devotion. Food and raiment must be wrested 
from the furrow and woven in the loom. And 
all our social and political institutions must be 
fought for on the field of battle, defended in the 
forum, and vindicated in the courts. Even our 
religious faiths must be thought out anew in 
the soul-conflicts of each generation, or they 
become mere forms of words, devoid of life and 
power. As Emerson says, " A thing uttered in 
words is not therefore affirmed. It must affirm 
itself, or no form of logic or of oath can give it 
evidence." 

This readiness and capacity for service is the 
fundamental test of a man's social worth ; and 
consequently the best evidence of his Christianity. 
If we could have but one test of a man's Chris- 
tianity ; if there were but one question which we 



224 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

could put to him, I suppose that question would 
be this : " Art thou intent on doing with thy might 
something which God has given thee to do, to 
make this world where he has placed thee a health- 
ier, happier, fairer, holier place ? " He whose life 
is a consistent affirmative answer to that question 
is an accepted son of the Father, whatever be 
the intellectual process by which that sonship has 
been attained. This is by no means equivalent 
to the assertion that faith is non-essential, or that 
church-connection is unnecessary, or that creeds 
are superfluous ; any more than our Lord's para- 
ble of the two sons is an argument for disrespect 
to parents. 

And service involves sacrifice. The world is 
not merely incomplete, and in need of service. 
It is deformed and corrupted by sin, and needs 
redemption. And a large part of one's work for 
the world has to be devoted, not to the upbuilding 
of the right, but to the overthrow of wrong ; not 
to the cultivation of virtue, but to the destruc- 
tion of vice ; not to the promotion of good, 
but to the eradication of evil ; not to the culti- 
vation of health, but to the healing of disease. 
Here comes in the call for sacrifice. The 
Christian, like his Lord, must become a bearer of 
the sins and iniquities of the world ; that through 



SOCIOLOGICAL 225 

his sufferings the sorrows of the world may be 
lightened, its darkness dissipated, its sins atoned 
for and its destruction stayed. 

Make any serious effort to improve the condi- 
tion and character of men, and you are brought 
face to face with this hydra-headed monster sin. 
Try to relieve poverty in a single family, and 
you find the extortionate and irresponsible land- 
lord of the unsanitary tenement, the hard-hearted 
saloon-keeper, the conscienceless "sweater," stand- 
ing ready to snatch every penny of your charity 
from the hands of those you try to help. And 
if you evade these foes, then your gift falls a 
prey to the more terrible enemy of the poor man's 
--own shiftlessness and lack of self-respect ; and his 
poor wife's inability to cook a wholesome and eco- 
nomical meal, or to spend either his earnings or 
your gift to advantage. Poverty, intemperance, 
extortion, irresponsible use of wealth, unhealthful 
and indecent conditions of life, ignorance, social 
ostracism, despair, lust, cruelty, laziness, dishon- 
esty, untruthfulness, are so many different mani- 
festations of what ethics regards as perversions of 
appetites, interests, and instincts in themselves 
innocent ; but which theology must consider as 
the phases of the one deadly and destructive 
principle, sin. 

Q 



226 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

Evil and sin confront us as fearful facts. They 
mar and pervert this fair and goodly world which 
God has made. And yet they are not positive 
and enduring forces. Evil is always a negation 
of good. Wrong is a perversion of what might 
be and ought to be right. Sin is the missing of 
the mark of that ideal excellence at which we 
ought to aim. The measure of the evil of an act 
is simply the amount of good which it displaces. 
The sin and wrong and evil of intemperance or 
licentiousness consists not in the sensuous pleas- 
ures for the sake of which men practise these 
vices. The terrible, pitiful, heartrending evil of 
these vices appears when we consider the good 
which they displace and destroy. Property wasted 
and health impaired ; wretched homes and bleed- 
ing hearts ; weakened wills and deadened sensibil- 
ities ; loveless marriages and homeless children ; 
these beautiful things so horribly disfigured ; these 
tender ties so rudely torn asunder ; these sweet 
fountains of purity and love so foully polluted and 
horribly embittered ; these goods displaced, per- 
verted, corrupted, and destroyed, measure the enor- 
mity and heinousness of these most loathsome 
and repulsive forms of sin. Sin is a parasite 
which lives only by destroying that on which it 
feeds. But though a parasite, it is a mighty one. 



SOCIOLOGICAL 227 

It has fastened itself upon everything good and 
fair in all this world. Sometimes the only way 
to destroy it has been to destroy the men on 
whom it has fastened itself. That is the way of 
punishment, and vengeance, and revolution. The 
better way to destroy it is to identify ourselves 
in sympathy and compassion with those who bear 
the burden of guilt and misery which sin inflicts ; 
to let it fasten itself on us ; to suffer with them ; 
to bear with them the burden, and perhaps perish 
under its weight. That is the way of sacrifice, the 
way of the cross, the way of atonement and re- 
demption, the way in which Christ walked, and in 
which he bids us follow. 

True self-sacrifice is never for its own sake ; • 
never for mere show ; never simply to mark off 
the Christian from the world ; never mere playing 
martyr. It is a poor pitiful type of Christianity 
that has to resort to the exhibition of artificial 
and arbitrary impositions and privations to mark 
itself off from the world. Self-denial for its own 
sake ; self-denial that is sour and ascetic ; self- 
denial that despises the good things of the world 
and tries to set itself above them, is foolish and 
false and unchristian. Christian self-denial is 
always the surrender of a lower for the sake of 
a higher good. 



228 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

Sacrifice that is made in the service of the good 
and in conflict with the evil in the world; self- 
denial that is incidental to a larger and truer self- 
realization ; self-denial which values at their true 
worth all the world's delights, and still can do 
without them for the sake of the larger delight 
of others and the deeper joy of sympathy and 
love ; self-denial that declines personal indulgence 
as cheerfully and eagerly and unpretentiously as 
an athlete throws off his coat to run a race, when 
there are human needs to be served or human 
wrongs to be endured and righted ; this is heroic, 
Christian, divine. 

Vicarious suffering is not an arbitrary contriv- 
ance by which Christ bought a formal pardon for 
the world. It is a universal law, of which the 
cross of Christ is the eternal symbol. It is the 
price some one must pay for every step of progress 
and every conquest over evil the world shall ever 
gain. 

The redemption of the world means the preva- 
lence of a healthy, happy, holy, human life. Even 
in normal or sinless conditions, a large part of the 
highest enjoyment would be found in mutual ser- 
vice, but the service would be itself a pleasure, 
and would involve no costly sacrifice. The pres- 
ence of sin and moral evil compels us to carry 



c 



SOCIOLOGICAL 229 

our service to the point of sacrifice. And yet 
even out of this sacrifice comes the deepest joy. 
"There shall be joy in heaven over one sinner 
that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine 
righteous persons, which need no repentance." 

The redemption of the world, like the salvation 
of the individual, is a gradual process. The indi- 
vidual is saved the moment he renounces sin and 
surrenders to the will of God. And yet this act of 
his central will and intelligence does not carry 
with it all at once the complete conformity of 
every act to the new principle. 

The world has been redeemed from the moment 
when Christ came into it ; from the moment when 
love was consciously accepted as the true law of 
human life. This Christian principle of loving 
service and willing self-sacrifice for the glory of 
God and the good of men is the central principle 
of the clearest thinking and most earnest willing 
in the world to-day. It is the spiritual principle 
of the modern world. It is the secret of whatever 
of constancy and courage and hope and high en- 
deavour animates the representative modern man. 
To be sure, it is not always explicitly conscious of 
the historic source of its inspiration ; it is not 
always in intellectual sympathy with the formulas 
in which the Christian tradition is expressed. But 



230 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

under various names, — altruism, utilitarianism, 
evolution, science, art, law, public spirit, philan- 
thropy, reform, progress, idealism, — the character 
we all admire and, under one name or another, 
confess as our ideal, is not the hard, narrow, petty 
self-seeking of the natural man ; but the broad, 
sympathetic, generous unselfishness which is the 
essence of Christ's Gospel and the principle of the 
kingdom which he came to found. 

The presence of this Spirit of love as the accepted 
and accredited ideal of conduct and character is 
itself the proof that the world has been redeemed. 
It is the promise and potency of its complete 
redemption. The Spirit must do his quiet, 
silent work for many centuries to come before 
even present standards of conduct will be univer- 
sally accepted. And as each form of existing evil 
is overcome, new spheres of duty, richer experi- 
ences of love, larger spheres of truth, deeper 
springs of life, will be disclosed " in the perpetual 
progress of the species towards a point of unattain- 
able perfection." 

A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump. The 
lump that has the leaven in it is potentially leav- 
ened ; although there may be large portions of the 
mass which the leaven has not yet reached. The 
world already has within it the principle which is 



SOCIOLOGICAL 23 1 

destined to make it a heaven. Multitudes of men 
and women have this principle in their hearts as 
the conscious Spirit of their lives. Multitudes 
more have caught the Spirit of unselfish living 
from others, without recognizing its historic origin, 
and without being able to give conscious expres- 
sion to the principle which really rules their con- 
duct and is moulding their character. Multitudes 
more still sit in darkness, or stand in deliberate 
rebellion ; unable or unwilling to welcome the love 
that lights the world. 

And yet the Spirit's presence in so many hearts 
to-day, the steady and increasing conquest of the 
Christ, is the certain prophecy that every nation 
and every tribe at no distant day shall hear the 
message of the Christian missionary ; feel the 
healing touch of the Christian physician ; respond 
to the voice of the Christian teacher ; and enjoy 
the blessings of liberty and light and law and love 
which Christian civilization, though unfortunately 
it does not send these forces as its advance guard, 
ultimately carries in its train. 
. Doubtless the law of natural selection has still 
some seemingly severe work to do with the 
inferior races. It may be that the only differ- 
ence between Christian and pagan civilization, in 
their approach to these races, will be the substi- 



232 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

tution of a slower and gentler for a sudden and 
violent extermination. Still, the fact that the 
higher displaces the lower, and survival turns on 
fitness, indicates a profound beneficence at the 
heart of even this seeming cruelty. With races, 
as with individuals, the dealings of God are on so 
vast a scale that the side turned toward us often 
seems to be one of unmitigated harshness and 
severity. Perpetuated physical inferiority would 
not tend to permanent spiritual superiority. At 
all events it is our duty to bring to these races 
the best we have to offer, in material and mental 
and social and spiritual things ; and then, if they 
are able to endure the light, we shall have con- 
ferred the highest blessing in our power ; and if 
they are not, we must accept their elimination just 
as we do that of the incorrigible individual, as 
a sad but necessary stage of the progress of 
mankind and the redemption of the world. 



CHAPTER IX 

ABSTRACTION AND AGGREGATION THE ORGANIZA- 
TION OF THE KINGDOM 

In the last chapter we saw that egoism, or the 
selfish enjoyment of the world, though good as far 
as it goes, is a very imperfect good, and requires 
the addition of altruism, or the service of others, 
and even sacrifice for the sake of such service, in 
order to render it in any degree a tolerable princi- 
ple of life. Yet altruism is itself incomplete and 
unsatisfying. Let us examine briefly its short- 
comings. Here is a man pouring out his life in 
charity and philanthropy ; organizing right and 
overthrowing wrong ; preaching sanitation and 
temperance and justice, and denouncing the un- 
healthy tenement, the saloon, and the sweater ; 
giving his days and nights to toil and strife and 
agitation, to feed the hungry, stay the oppressor, 
and rouse the indifferent. In a word, he is doing 
with all his might that work of reform and re- 
demption which Jesus inaugurated, and on which 
the welfare of society depends. And yet every 

233 



234 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

one who has undertaken in any earnest way to do 
these things knows what a terrible sense of disap- 
pointment and discouragement and despair comes 
over one when he stops to think how mighty all 
these forces of evil are. We find ourselves so 
feeble and so frail ; our puny efforts seem so vain ; 
our blunders are so costly ; our negligence is so 
criminal. No man ever worked hard for a good 
cause or fought valiantly against an intrenched 
abuse without at times having this feeling of 
depression and self-distrust come over him and 
cast him down. This task of setting the world 
right is too vast for our puny hands, and the futil- 
ity of our attempts to accomplish the impossible 
forces itself in upon our weary souls until we are 
ready to exclaim with Elijah, as he sat under the 
juniper tree, "It is enough; now, O Lord, take 
away my life ; for I am not better than my 
fathers." 

Then we need the assurance that we are not 
alone ; that the battle we are fighting is not con- 
fined to the brief time and narrow space we oc- 
cupy ; but that it is a single incident in a grand 
campaign, and that we are members of one great 
whole, and our work is part of one great compre- 
hensive plan. Then we need to know that we 
belong to God ; that he is with us ; and that in his 



SOCIOLOGICAL 235 

name we shall ultimately conquer. Such an assur- 
ance most religious persons gain through pious 
feeling. To others it must come as a clear in- 
sight, if it is to come at all. They ask the question 
whether there is any such unity in the spiritual 
world ? They insist on seeing life as a whole, or 
else they refuse to regard it as divine. 

This question whether there be any spiritual 
unity in the universe, through which our lives may 
become unified ; any great and glorious whole, of 
which our lives may form noble and worthy mem- 
bers, is the fundamental problem of religion. The 
briefest answer to it would be to refer back to the 
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and say that 
the true unity of life is found in union with the 
living God ; to point out that our weakness and 
isolation is due to sin ; that by repentance and 
faith and grace we may escape, and be born anew, 
and grow into oneness with the life of God. Such 
an answer, however, would be a mere summary of 
what has gone before. It would convince only 
those who have been convinced already. 

Instead of offering this too easy answer, it will 
be more profitable to take up in this new form the 
whole spiritual problem afresh, and see whether, 
in an attempt to find an answer to this practical 
problem of the spiritual life, we reach the same 



236 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

conclusion that we have already reached from the 
speculative side. Plato in the Republic teaches us 
that the problem of individual morality is best 
solved by studying the larger features of the state. 
In like manner that emotional and spiritual unity, 
which we crave as the satisfactory solution of our 
individual lives, is most readily and surely found in 
the practical unity of organic social life. 

Let us then, in conclusion, consider the funda- 
mental question of all practical philosophy : What 
is true unity ? and how may it be gained ? 

There are three ways in which you may try to 
reduce a mass of material to unity and consistency : 
the way of abstraction ; the way of aggregation ; 
and the way of organization. 

The way of abstraction eliminates all differ- 
ences, strips off all definiteness and determination, 
until there remains the empty form of pure being 
which, as Hegel tells us, is one and the same as 
nothing. 

Stated in this plain formula, it does not seem as 
though such an unsubstantial ghost could lead any 
one astray ; much less do positive harm. Yet this 
pale, colourless nonentity of an abstract unity, hol- 
low and unreal as it appears in its naked metaphys- 
ical essence, arrayed in the robes of ethics, sociol- 
ogy, theology, education, has managed to deceive 



SOCIOLOGICAL 237 

some of the very elect ; and in the privations of as- 
cetics, the mutilations of monastics, the monotonous 
tautology of mystics, the unsubstantial schemes of 
socialists, the dreary curricula of pedants, has 
proved its ghostly potency to make the lives of 
men and women who cherish it as hollow and 
empty and shrivelled and unreal as itself. 

The attempt to unify life by abstraction leads 
to asceticism. It is desire, appetite, passion, 
that leads us astray. Therefore repress desire ; 
eradicate appetite ; stifle passion, and the difficulty 
will be removed. Erect self-sacrifice into an end ; 
self-denial into a virtue ; self-mortification into a 
duty, and apparently the problem of the moral life 
will be solved. 

So says asceticism ; whether in the filthy rags of 
the Cynic ; the plain garb of the Stoic ; the coarse 
frock of the Franciscan ; or the sombre cloak of 
the Puritan. By abstracting all principles of dif- 
ference, you seem to get unity ; by excluding all 
that can make discord, you think to secure har- 
mony ; by eliminating the elements of strife, you 
hope to establish peace. 

Alas ! Not so simple is the solution of our 
moral struggles. In abstracting difference, you 
take away the very stuff that unity is made of. In 
excluding discord, you strike out the very notes of 



238 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

which all harmony must be composed. In elimi- 
nating the possibility of strife, you remove the 
very forces which must be the contracting parties 
to any peace that is worthy to endure. 

Heraclitus was right. War is the father of all 
things. It is out of difference that unity is 
formed ; out of discord that harmony is composed; 
out of strife that peace is won. And the device of 
the ascetic is a feeble evasion of the difficulty ; a 
cowardly desertion of the battle-field. To conquer 
by running away from the enemy is not victory: 
and the conceit of the Cynic, the pride of the 
Stoic, are but pitiful counterfeits of the true glory 
of the moral conqueror. The cheap virtue that 
comes of self-contraction ; the empty duty that 
consists in formal self-assertion ; the hollow pride 
that is born of self-abnegation, — these are the 
bitter, sour, disappointing fruits of the futile effort 
to unify life by abstracting the very substance of 
which life is made. For it shrivels life to the 
narrow dimensions of an empty chamber within a 
hard and hollow shell. 

The method of abstraction in sociology gives 
us socialism. It has much to say of organization, 
and deals largely in organic analogies. But it is 
the organization of imaginary rather than of 
real men and women. It is organization of the 



SOCIOLOGICAL 239 

tyrannical military type, rather than the organiza- 
tion of free spontaneous life. It deals with fancies 
rather than with facts. Like Wharton, in Mrs. 
Ward's Marcella, the socialist of this type is false 
to what is, in fancied fidelity to what ought to 
be. This withdrawal from the actual for the sake 
of an ideal is the very essence of abstraction, 
whether in the asceticism of the moralist, the 
unpracticalness of the socialist, or the other- 
worldliness of the religionist. The attempt to 
give unity to society by treating men and women 
as abstractions, rather than as the actual beings 
that they are, is the characteristic mark of social- 
ism from Plato to the present day. 

Ignore the actual facts of our inconsistent 
human nature ; assume that men and women are 
what they ought to be, instead of reckoning with 
them as they are ; eliminate from them all indi- 
viduality and independence, and reduce them to 
the dead level of so many commodity producers 
and happiness consumers ; and then it is the 
easiest thing in the world to make them fit ex- 
actly into the niches you have cut out for them 
in your abstract socialistic scheme. This abstract 
man who loves only the abstract woman will be 
perfectly content with the community of wives 
in Plato's Republic. The artist who is devoted 



24O SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

to art in general will be perfectly satisfied to have 
his career marked out for him by a central em- 
ployment bureau. And so on through all the 
range of definite concrete affections, interests, 
and enthusiasms which make up the complex life 
of man. The only trouble is that these men who 
are equally in love with everybody, and equally 
fitted for anything, really love nobody, and are 
absolutely good for nothing. Hegel's saying that 
being and not being are the same, translated into 
these social, terms, gives the maxim that the love 
of everybody is the same thing as the love of 
nobody ; and being good for anything is equiva- 
lent to being good for nothing. For these 
abstract, nobody-loving, good-for-nothing beings, 
socialism would provide an ideal paradise. Actual 
men and women of flesh and blood, however, pre- 
fer to find their universal in the individual, and 
through the straitened gate of a particular af- 
fection, and the narrow way of a definite devo- 
tion, find entrance to the deeper love and the 
larger life. 

Abstract unity in religion presents itself as 
other-worldliness. " Good bye, proud world, we're 
going home," is its monotonous refrain. Check 
the wild beating of your natural heart ; curb 
the eager ambitions of your carnal mind ; accept 



SOCIOLOGICAL 24 1 

your work as a stern necessity ; assume family 
and social obligations as a serious duty ; shun 
pleasure as a deadly snare ; and thus by ab- 
stracting from life all its normal interests, its 
healthy enthusiasms and its natural charms, 
you get a thin, pale, morbid, melancholy residuum 
of a religion whose only claim to be called spirit- 
ual is that it is unnatural, and whose only hope 
of heaven is its manifest unfitness for earth. 
The reign of the abstract in religion, however, is 
happily at an end, except in individuals left over 
from past generations, and in rural regions which 
remain unreached by the dominant influences of 
the hour. 

The way of aggregation has had numerous and 
able representatives from Democritus to John 
Stuart Mill. The hard-headed adherents of this 
materialistic creed see through the transparent 
emptiness of your pale abstractions, and will have 
none of them. Particulars are to them the ulti- 
mate and sole realities, and the only unity they 
know is the artificial and fictitious unity which we 
give to them by adding and grouping these par- 
ticulars together. 

This type of unity stated in terms of pure 
metaphysics seems innocent and harmless enough. 
Yet carried over into ethics it means hedonism ; 

R 



242 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

in economics and sociology it means laissez faire ; 
in theology it means agnosticism ; in the intellec- 
tual life it means chaos and despair. This type 
of unity has none of the winsomeness and charm 
of the abstract unity. Cold, hard, soulless, aloof ; 
its weapons are mathematics and formal logic, and 
its conquests are among men and women of lofty 
but unimaginative minds ; of sincere but unemo- 
tional hearts. 

The attempt to unify life by aggregation gives 
hedonism. Reduce all the rich diversity of con- 
crete interests, enthusiasms, and affections to the 
monotonous, flat, insipid, common form of pleas- 
ure ; then put your precious pleasures in the scales 
and weigh them ; lay them on the table and meas- 
ure their length and breadth (hedonists generally 
forget to mention depth, because there is no depth 
to pleasure thus conceived); then pile up your 
weighed and measured pleasures into a heap in 
your own memory and imagination (pleasures are 
so fleeting that they cannot be held together long 
enough to constitute a real heap) ; then call that 
man happiest whose memory retains the biggest 
heap of pleasures that he has enjoyed, and you 
have the only consistent moral unity which hedon- 
ism can impart to life. To be sure, hedonists since 
John Stuart Mill have sought, in addition to the 



SOCIOLOGICAL 243 

crude weighing and measuring of Hobbes and 
Bentham, to introduce tests of quality, and, by 
strange tricks of logical jugglery, to stretch pleas- 
ure beyond the sensibilities of the individual, to 
whom alone it strictly can belong, until it is spread 
out in perilously attenuated form to cover the 
whole human race. But these are considerations 
foreign to the fundamental principle of hedonism. 
You can greatly improve a knife which has a dull 
blade and a broken handle by putting in a new 
blade and a new handle, but you abandon your old 
knife in the process. And so when you prefer a 
less pleasure to a greater because it is higher, you 
have introduced a standard higher than pleasure, 
by which pleasure itself is judged. And when you 
seek the pleasure of others you are introducing a 
motive which derives its dynamic power, not from 
a present feeling in your body, which in the last 
analysis pleasure must be, but from an idea before 
your mind, which is a very different thing from 
pleasure. Into the subtle refinements by which 
modern evolutionary writers have tried to stretch 
without breaking, and to change without destroy- 
ing, the conception of pleasure as the ultimate unit 
out of which by aggregation the moral life must 
be built up, we cannot enter here. 

Consistent hedonism makes pleasure the ulti- 



244 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

mate test of the worth of conduct, and makes the 
aggregate of pleasures the test of the worth of 
life. And in doing so it sacrifices the spiritual 
substance of life to its sensuous form ; it inverts 
the normal relations of means to ends ; it throws 
the noblest aims, the tenderest affections, the holi- 
est aspirations, the most refined tastes, into the fur- 
nace ; melts them all down into the crude material, 
out of which, according to its theory, they are 
alike composed ; and then tells us that he who can 
show the largest number of pieces of this common 
substance cooled down, gauged, weighed, done up 
in packages, and labelled, is the happiest, and 
therefore the best of men. To such intolerable 
monotony, to such insufferable insipidity, does 
the materialistic method of mere mechanical ag- 
gregation reduce the moral life of man. 

The attempt to solve the social problem by the 
method of aggregation, leads one into the indis- 
criminate and promiscuous helping of individuals 
as they are. It seeks to relieve poverty, regard- 
less of its cause. It tries to find employment for 
the idle, regardless of the demand for the product. 
It aims to relieve suffering, without stopping to 
inquire whether the suffering is beneficent and 
disciplinary penalty, or accidental and unavoidable 
misfortune. It attempts to make the greatest 



SOCIOLOGICAL 245 

number of individuals well off, without consider- 
ing" the well-being of the society to which they are 
related. And, consequently, in adding remedies 
this method multiplies disease. 

The utter futility of attempting to relieve pov- 
erty without removing its causes and conditions ; 
the positive mischief of helping an individual, 
without at the same time helping him to resume 
his normal connection with society, is everywhere 
recognized as the first principle of scientific 
charity. To disengage the individual from so- 
ciety is as grave a practical mistake, as to abstract 
society from the concrete individuals who com- 
pose it is a serious speculative fallacy. 

The aggregate conception in religion is to-day 
everywhere enthroned, and is in the zenith of its 
power. So far from being a saint's rest for the 
sanctified, the church, according to this view, is 
to be the centre of the most multifarious activi- 
ties. It is to be a " workshop rather than a 
cathedral." The cooking and serving of food; 
the manufacture and distribution of clothing ; the 
teaching and training of children ; the instruction 
and entertainment of young people ; the provi- 
sion of homes for the homeless and work for the 
unemployed ; military drill for the boys ; benevo- 
lent circles for the girls ; countless committees for 



246 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

men and numberless ministrations for women ; — 
these are the characteristics of the typical modern 
church. It is said that an applicant for admis- 
sion to such a church, having some difficulty in 
satisfactorily expressing her religious experience, 
finally summed it all up in the single sentence, 
" I want to be like Martha, cumbered about much 
serving," and thereupon was admitted to member- 
ship at once. 

Now we all welcome this tendency as a needed 
protest against the other-worldliness which went 
before it. We all honour the institutional churches 
which are springing up in the more needy quar- 
ters of our large cities. Just as in bodily disease, 
when some of the bodily members are out of 
order, other members are compelled to do the 
work of the disabled members in addition to their 
own ; so in abnormal social conditions the church 
is called upon to do the work of several social 
instrumentalities in addition to its own. All 
honour to the exceptionally located churches which 
are rising to meet exceptional responsibilities by 
special efforts and enlarged activities. Yet to 
erect this exceptional type of church into a stand- 
ard for the measurement of all churches would be 
to adopt the aggregate rather than the organic as 
the type of church work and religious life. 



SOCIOLOGICAL 247 

The unity that comes through organization is 
not so easy to define. It transcends space ; almost 
annihilates time ; defies mathematics, and is the 
despair of formal logic. The whole is in the parts; 
the parts are in the whole. There is an instanta- 
neous response of each member to the conditions 
of every other. The whole is more than the sum 
of its parts, and the internal relationships are so 
subtle that they cannot be adequately expressed 
in terms of action and reaction from without. The 
secret of this organic life is the nervous system 
which binds each part to every other ; makes the 
whole responsive to the needs of every part, and 
every part an instrument for the furtherance of 
the interests of the whole. The whole gives to 
the parts whatever meaning and significance they 
have ; and the parts in turn give to the whole 
whatever expression and realization it attains. 
Not in timid self-repression ; not in reckless self- 
indulgence ; not in nursing an abstract virtuous- 
ness, nor in hugging an illusive aggregate of 
pleasures, will man find the unity he seeks. Moral 
virtue is neither a pale abstraction from all that 
is attractive, nor a stupid aggregate of undifferen- 
tiated delights. 

Every appetite and passion of our nature is, in 
its rightful exercise and normal function, holy, 



248 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

humanizing, God-ordained. These natural impulses 
of ours, which, perverted, lead to such swift, sure, 
and terrible destruction, are yet the only avenues 
through which we can come into fullest appropria- 
tion of the bounties of nature, the beauties of art, 
the sweet delights of family and home, and the 
larger life of society and state. Pleasurable though 
their exercise may be, yet their normal end is not 
the pleasurable sensations which always accom- 
pany the exercise of function ; but the wide, rich, 
blooming fields of nature and humanity into which 
they lead us, and of which they make us conscious 
and cooperating members. 

The unity of life which comes from organizing 
all its throbbing impulses and bounding passions, 
its rapturous pleasures and exquisite pains, its 
glorious delights and heroic sacrifices, its homely 
joys and its humble duties into the expression of 
an ever-expanding will, an ever-widening inter- 
est, an ever-deepening love toward all the good 
this glorious world contains ; — this is the unity 
at which the moral life must aim. 

The solution of the social problem by organiza- 
tion does not offer so obvious and speedy remedies 
for particular social ills as the methods previously 
considered. Society must enlarge rather than 
restrict the freedom of its individual members. 



SOCIOLOGICAL 249 

And individuals in turn must be bound more 
closely rather than more loosely to the society to 
which they properly belong. Society must leave 
its members free in order to get from them the 
most effective service ; and individuals must serve 
society loyally in order to realize their own best 
individual life. Reform from the side of the state 
must consist chiefly in preventing one class from 
taking unfair advantage of the necessities of an- 
other class. And reform from the side of the 
individual must consist chiefly in developing the 
disposition in each to consider the interests of 
others and of all. Not the forcing upon individ- 
uals of a better social order ; not the rescue of 
individuals from the evils of the existing order, 
but the adaptation of society to the actual needs 
of individuals, and the adjustment of individuals 
to the actual requirements of society, and thus the 
gradual improvement of each element through the 
improvement of the others; — this is the organic 
unity of society, toward which all practical social 
reform must tend. As Mr. Kidd has expressed it, 
" The avowed aim of socialism is to suspend that 
personal rivalry and competition of life which not 
only is now, but has been from the beginning of 
life, the fundamental impetus behind all progress. 
The inherent tendency of the process of social 



250 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

development now taking place amongst us is to 
raise this rivalry to the very highest degree of 
efficiency as a condition of progress, by bringing 
all the people into it on a footing of equality, and 
by allowing the freest possible play of forces within 
the community, and the widest possible opportuni- 
ties for the development of every individual's fac- 
ulties and personality." Wise social organization 
is not the suppression of individuality. It is the 
condition of the most complete individualization, 
and the richest and fullest development of person- 
ality. 

Organic unity in the religious life neither with- 
draws religious spirits from active contact with 
the world, nor yet does it impose upon the church 
as such a multitude of special duties and func- 
tions. It bids the average Christian live in the 
world in the ordinary relations of father, husband, 
citizen, workman, neighbour, and friend ; and at 
the same time bids him make these concrete 
human relationships the expression of a divine 
righteousness and a Christlike love. It makes the 
Christian differ from other men, not in the kind 
of things he does, nor in the amount of work he 
undertakes, but rather in the different way in 
which he does the same things which other men 
are doing, and in the different spirit in which he 



SOCIOLOGICAL 2$ I 

fulfils the simple relationships which are common 
to us all. The highest type of Christian is not 
the man who withdraws from the world in pious 
meditation ; not the man who attacks it with the 
reforming zeal of a John the Baptist, though this 
is great ; indeed the greatest of the natural vir- 
tues. Greater, however, than any spirit that is 
born of woman, or merely natural, is the spirit 
which comes eating and drinking ; makes friends 
with publicans and sinners ; shares the mingled 
good and evil of man's common lot, and lives 
and works patiently and quietly to make these 
common human relationships a glory to God and 
a blessing to mankind. It is of these quiet, 
patient, modest, self-forgetful souls, who do their 
simple duty in plain, humble, homely ways, that 
the real solid substance of God's kingdom is com- 
posed. Unnumbered because, thank God, they 
are so many ; unnoticed because their piety is so 
natural, their life so normal, their divineness so 
human ; these, whose lips are seldom heard to 
say, " Lord, Lord," and whose left hands know 
not the doings of the right, — these simple, child- 
like hearts are the salt of the earth and the light 
of the world, the redeemers of man and the chil- 
dren of God. 

It is not by getting away from the world, nor 



252 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

by plunging madly into it, that we shall find the 
unity of life we seek. It is by binding together 
thought and life ; by making the humblest details 
of daily duty express the loftiest aspects of our 
faith ; it is by bringing the universal down to 
the particular, and lifting the definite up into 
the infinite, that we shall fulfil the social function 
of religion. Religion should do for the social 
organism what the nerves do for the body. It is 
the function of the nerves to bind all the parts of 
the body together, and so to place the resources 
of the whole at the disposal of every part. Attack 
the lion anywhere, and instantly his powerful paw 
is upon you and his cruel teeth are in your flesh. 
That is made possible by the nerve which binds 
the part you rashly ventured to attack to the 
brain, which instantly transmits along another 
nerve the order that outraged dignity shall be 
avenged. In like manner it is the function of 
religion to bring to bear upon any given point in 
the social organism the thought and will of God. 

The disciples once came back to Jesus rejoic- 
ing over the great things that they had done, 
exclaiming, " Lord, even the devils are subject 
unto us." Jesus assured them of continued 
power ; yet, with that transcendent insight which 
made each incident in his career a fresh reve- 



SOCIOLOGICAL 253 

lation of divine wisdom and truth, he added, 
"Notwithstanding, in this rejoice not, that the 
spirits are subject unto you, but rather rejoice 
because your names are written in heaven." 
Not what they had wrought by their individ- 
ual efforts, but what they were by virtue of their 
spiritual purpose and relationship — this was to 
be the deep, abiding secret of their joy. 

The kingdom of God comes not chiefly with 
observation, nor are its most faithful members 
heralded in the press and on the platform 
with " Lo, here," and " Lo, there." It is not 
in the range of our opportunity, nor in the 
amount of our performance, nor in the fame 
of our attainments, but by the completeness 
with which we organize the simple relations of 
our every-day life into an expression of all the 
truth and beauty and goodness we have learned 
to love, that we gain the true unity of life, ful- 
fil the social function of the Christian, and main- 
tain our membership in the kingdom of God. 

The kingdom of God lies not in some remote 
sphere which can be reached only in another 
state of existence ; and can be anticipated only 
by the abstract methods of asceticism, Utopian 
visions, and other-worldliness. No more does 
it consist of a blind and meaningless aggregate 



254 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

of pleasurable or charitable or ecclesiastical ac- 
tivities. The kingdom of God is here and now. 
It is made of just such stuff as human life is 
made of. It is the coordination and correlation 
of the appetites, impulses, passions, pursuits, in- 
terests, affections, and aspirations of man. Happy 
homes, cheerful school-rooms, faithful work, hon- 
est trade, wholesome food, healthful dwellings, 
beautiful parks, beneficent government, public- 
spirited citizenship, official integrity, good books, 
public libraries, beautiful pictures, refined social 
intercourse, vigorous out-door life, abundant rec- 
reation, — these are some of the positive ele- 
ments that are essential to the realization of the 
kingdom of God. And on the negative side, 
as defences against the forces which are always 
tending to postpone and defeat the coming of 
this kingdom, there must be the numerous chari- 
ties and reforms, the hospitals and asylums and 
prisons, the police and the courts and the armies, 
which are necessary to care for the unfortunate 
and the sick ; to restrain the avarice and lust 
and lawlessness of those who in character and 
conduct refuse to enter the kingdom and obey 
its law of love. 

All those who sincerely strive to subordinate 
their purely personal interests and private pleas- 



SOCIOLOGICAL 255 

ures to the larger interests and nobler joys which 
come of conscious participation in the well-being 
of the social whole, are members of the king- 
dom. The kingdom of God and the well-being 
of man are opposite sides of one and the self- 
same thing. And he who participates in the 
promotion of human well-being therein partakes 
of the blessedness of the kingdom of God. 

So simple, so inevitable, so automatic, is the 
process of admission or exclusion. The gates 
of the kingdom are wide open day and night, 
that all who love and serve their fellow-men may 
enter. And yet the walls of service, the steeps 
of sacrifice, are so high on every side that no 
thief or robber, intent on securing its benefits 
without sharing its generous and sacrificial spirit, 
can climb up and enter in by any other way. 

Such is the kingdom of God as we know it here 
and now. What of the future ? There is no way 
of judging the future save by the past and the 
present. It is idle to presume to determine the 
issues of eternity by our interpretation of this 
or that figurative passage even of Sacred Scrip- 
ture. Some things are sure. Righteousness and 
love will be noble and blessed always and every- 
where ; and the clearer the light in which they 
are revealed the greater will be their glory. 



256 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

Sin and selfishness will be mean and miserable 
always and everywhere ; and the more transpar- 
ent the mode of existence and the more mature 
the development of these traits, the more odious 
and wretched they will become. To be seen as 
he is, to be known in his real nature, to have 
all disguises stripped from his naked spirit ; to 
have each feature of his selfishness and sin 
brought out in clear relief against the pure 
white light of love, so that no associate could 
be found who should not see and know him as 
he is; — this would be the severest penalty the 
sinner could receive. And this would be the only 
possible fate of the persistent sinner in a spirit- 
world where souls should see face to face, and 
know as they are known. 

Would sinners in such conditions persist in 
sin, or would they continue in existence if they 
did ? To this question we must answer squarely 
that we do not know. Our intensest name for 
shame is mortification. Disguise and hypocrisy 
and concealment is the only resource which 
makes the life of the mean and selfish man 
endurable in this world. With this withdrawn, 
the sinner would not wish to continue in sin. 
And we can hardly conceive that the Father of 
our spirits would force on an unwilling soul 



SOCIOLOGICAL 257 

an existence alike abhorrent to God and miser- 
able for the man himself. The Omnipotent 
does not stand in need of such artificial, cruel, 
and sensational devices to maintain the dignity 
of his law and the majesty of his government. 

Will the righteous survive ? Is immortality 
assured to the just ? A full discussion of the 
great question of immortality does not fall within 
the limits of the purpose of this book. Still this 
social point of view throws light on some aspects 
of the problem. Strict proof is impossible. There 
are, however, the strongest grounds for confidence; 
the largest reasons for hope. 

The man who has entered the kingdom and 
is living a life of unselfishness and love is obey- 
ing a law which is as eternal and universal 
in the spiritual sphere as is gravitation in the 
material sphere. Out of just such spirits as his, 
living on the same principle on which he is liv- 
ing, the kingdom of God must always and every- 
where be composed. The essential life which 
such a man is living must continue as long as 
the kingdom of God endures. It must exist 
wherever God holds sway. The life he is living, 
the spirit and aim and purpose of it, its love 
and its devotion, cannot die. Without such sons 
to do his will, God would cease to be the Father. 



258 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

Without such spirits to constitute his kingdom, 
the King would occupy an empty throne. 

If, then, God's kingdom shall endure, either 
his loyal subjects and obedient sons who are in 
existence here and now, must be preserved in 
existence, or else beings of the same spiritual 
purpose and life must be created or developed 
under other conditions to take their places. An- 
nihilation of those who have wrought out their 
sonship to God and their membership in his king- 
dom through the hard conflicts of earth and time, 
and the creation of others to take their places, 
certainly does not seem either an economical, or 
a just, or a kind mode of procedure. It is incon- 
sistent with the fatherhood of God. It robs the 
life of man of its deepest and widest significance. 
It is not what wisdom, beneficence, and love would 
prompt us to do to those who ever so feebly and 
imperfectly had learned to love us. It is incon- 
sistent with all that we know of the wisdom and 
love of God ; inconsistent with the clear insight 
and confident declaration of Christ ; inconsistent 
with the deepest intuitions and hopes of the 
human heart. 

Immortality is not necessary as a foundation for 
religion. There have been and are to-day pro- 
foundly religious spirits of whose faith this larger 



SOCIOLOGICAL 259 

hope forms no certain part. Even if this little 
life be all, the life of love is better than the life of 
selfishness ; the life of service is nobler than the 
life of sensual pleasure ; God is a more worthy 
object even for our short-lived devotion, than appe- 
tite and passion. Yet while immortality is not a 
demonstrable fact of science which we can hold up 
in advance as an inducement for beginning the 
religious life, it is a confident assurance which 
grows brighter and brighter with each new ex- 
perience of the blessedness of love and each fresh 
revelation of the goodness of God. 

The light of the knowledge of the glory of 
God in the face of Jesus Christ has come into 
the world ; and in proportion to our humility 
and unselfishness has shined in our hearts. 
Darkness and clouds are round about many of 
the problems connected with the nature of God 
and the destiny of man. Christ has brought life 
and immortality to light ; and the Spirit of 
Christ dwelling in our hearts gives us an ever- 
growing assurance that if we are " stedfast, 
unmovable, always abounding in the work of the 
Lord, our labour is not vain in the Lord." Out 
of this deep experience of the present love of 
Christ ; out of the strong courage with which 
the Spirit helps us to give our lives unsparingly in 



260 SOCIAL THEOLOGY 

social service, there is born the lively hope and 
the serene confidence that can come ito us in no 
easier way and on no cheaper terms; — the prac- 
tical certainty that " he that doeth the will of God 
abideth forever." 



SOCIAL EVOLUTION. 

By BENJAMIN KIDD. 

NEW EDITION, REVISED, WITH A NEW PREFACE. 
i2mo, cloth, $1.50. Also cheap edition in paper covers, 25 cents. 



" The name of Mr. Benjamin Kidd, author of a very striking work on ' Social 
Evolution,' is, so far as we know, new to the literary world; but it is not often 
that a new and unknown writer makes his first appearance with a work so novel 
in conception, so fertile in suggestion, and on the whole so powerful in exposition 
as ' Social Evolution ' appears to us to be, ... a book which no serious thinker 
should neglect, and no reader can study without recognizing it as the work of a 
singularly penetrating and original mind." — The Times (London). 

" It is a study of the whole development of humanity in a new light, and it is 
sustained and strong and fresh throughout. ... It is a profound work which 
invites the attention of our ablest minds, and which will reward those who give it 
their careful and best thought. It marks out new lines of study, and is written in 
that calm and resolute tone which secures the confidence of the reader. It is 
undoubtedly the ablest book on social development that has been published for a 
long time." — Boston Herald. 

" Those who wish to follow the Bishop of Durham's advice to his clergy — ' to 
think over the questions of socialism, to discuss them with one another reverently 
and patiently, but not to improvise hasty judgments ' — will find a most admira- 
ble introduction in Mr. Kidd's book on social evolution. It is this because it not 
merely contains a comprehensive view of the very wide field of human progress, 
but is packed with suggestive thoughts for interpreting it aright. . . . We hope 
that the same clear and well-balanced judgment that has given us this helpful 
essay will not stay here, but give us further guidance as to the principles which 
ought to govern right thinking on this, the question of the day. We heartily 
commend this really valuable study to every student of the perplexing problems 
of socialism." — The Churchman. 



MACMILLAN & CO., 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. 

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